AUSTRALIAN COOKING METHODS

My very first food photography! Other than a few small snapshots here and there, I finally had a photo gig for food. Of course I never charge for any of my photos, so this was mainly for me to learn and have fun! I got incredibly hungry during the shoot, and the owner, Chef Andrew Johnstone, was very generous and gave me lunch and a gift card!

I was a little worried about taking good photos of food, so I sort of just looked at some photos online of food photography and thought I could do it myself.

I brought along a huge 52" gold/silver reflector with stand, and used natural lighting. I bounced the natural lighting from the front of the restaurant so I wouldn't create any crazy shadows on the opposite side. Worked out really nicely! The gold brought out all the warm colors.

I shot with a 105mm f/2.8 macro first, but then decided to go with a sharper 85mm f/1.4D at varying apertures. I wanted shallow depth of field, but just enough to show all the details of the contents of the plates, and blurring everything else. A nice PC-E lens might have worked out better. So I ended up using the 85 for most of the shots while on a tripod. I found the sweet spot at the distance I worked at (4 feet away or so) to yield good results around f/2.5 or so, giving enough detail in the plate without getting an annoying background.

I angled it slightly to give you a better sense of the food rather than top down. I had to make sure I didn't get the blue walls into the shot, so the close 85mm crop worked wonderfully.

Towards the end I decided to get a group shot of all the plates, which is when I realized how much more interesting the shots were with a wide angle!!!! Argh, I spent so much time with the 85 only to realize I should've played a lot more with my 20mm f/2.8!!!

I ended up getting some super exaggerated areas of the food, and also captured a lot of the "ambiance" of the restaurant as well with the wider lens. The f/2.8 was great for creating a shallow DOF in these shots as well. So I was able to get a closeup of the food, while showing it staged in the restaurant. AWESOME! Not the greatest for a menu, but for promotion and website use, it would be perfect. I would highly recommend everyone try using wide angles wide open for food photography! I loved it.

The 85mm yielded shots of the food with plenty of detail, great for showing off on a menu. The 20mm resulted in fun shots worth posting on Flickr and as promotion for a website.

Food photography is fun, makes you really hungry, but not sure if it's THAT interesting to me. I'm much more about taking photos of the preparation of the food, the people behind the scenes, and the cool details of a restaurant. But alas, here it is! Enjoy this series.

Campusfood.com is an online food ordering website for college students. They have added gamification to their experience by creating a badge system for users which encourages them to order more frequently and from different vendors in order to gain status in their online community. Repeat customers are rewarded with badges such as Raw Deal (10 sushi orders in a month) and Beta Taster (one of the first 50 people to order from a new menu). Since adding points and badges to Campusfood.com, the number of new users who return two or more times is up 15-20%, says Michael Saunders, the site's founder. The site even features a updating panel on their homepage showing who is earning badges.