Pittsburgh Food Photographer Archive – Salad

Here’s another food image from my archive database.

I believe I shot this for a local grocery store chain, when they’re “look” was a blown-out white background.  I think it’s a good look and it makes things really easy on the food photographer and the food stylist.  When you blow out the background with light, all the elements either go away of are made a lot less important and require less attention from the food photography team.  And it looks good too… :o)

Salads are actually really easy to shoot for me, because I’ve done it a hundred times.  The great thing about photographing a food like a salad, is that the food itself is so busy looking, that you really don’t have to worry about shadows.  And with the light I prefer to use, hiding shadows can really be an issue.

Food Photography Tip #1 for shooting salads

Back-lighting works really well for salads.  When you light salads from behind, the translucency of the various fruits and leaves. makes the photo very three-dimensional.

Food Photography Tip #2 for shooting salads

Also, Light from above.  There are a lot of “nooks and cranny’s” that you’ll need to get light down into, so that the shadows in our salad don’t become totally black.  Salads are not a “moody” food and emotionally, people tend to want to see the detail in their salad photo.  (I think I’ll write a post on the types of food and the lighting that people expect from photos of that food)

So, with this food photo, I like the lighting, the composition, and pretty much everything else. I’d be curious to see what you think.