A few years ago, while working on branding “The Cakery“, I developed a fascination with food photography.
It’s amazing how photographing “yummy” is so difficult, much more difficult than you’d expect. Colors are never consistent in food, and neither are contours. Light reflects in really strange ways because of all the oily materials used in cooking. Fruits are not beautiful naturally, and they need to be handpicked and polished.
And then there’s this: The layout of the photograph itself needs to have the painful balance of perfectly-placed items in symmetrical arrangements combined with the chaotic process of enjoying food, crumbs on the table and all. I can’t think of another way of explaining that sentence.
You know, when we think something looks yummy in real life, it’s often the smell rather than the visuals. Capturing the steam, the smell, the colors, AND the way the food makes you feel onto a picture is really difficult. And we didn’t even mention food styling, and the complexity of that.
That’s why I developed a fascination with food photography. It’s an underestimated art, and most people suck it. So I go around collecting pictures of food that’s captured beautifully. I even stopped wanting to eat them. Now I just look at the way they look, at how the light reflects, at the angle it’s captured from, at the color spectrum, at the layout, at the items scattered about…
[Related: Visual Order and Chaos and the Impossibility of Randomness]
