From what I know about food photography, it is usually meticulously stage-managed. A bit like fashion photography I suppose – the models are chosen for their looks and (in the case of meat at least) their lack of excess fat, the lighting is always carefully sculpted, and the framing is thoughtfully composed. I like my photography, and if chocolate is an ingredient, I like my food, but I don’t really see myself having the patience for all that. This image therefore is a bit more “real world”.
The models in this photograph are some veggie skewers and beef burgers on the barbeque in my parents-in-law’s house on one of the rare (the only?) days last summer when a barbeque was even feasible. The food had therefore earlier been chosen for its flavour rather than for its looks. However, sitting on that barbeque it was looking quite photogenic.
It was early evening (6.46pm if you must know), so the sun was low in the sky, and added a nice warm side-light to the shot. The sky was clear with no clouds, so that light source became a hard light, resulting in the high contrast between the lit and the unlit areas of the shot.
I tried a few compositions, both at time of capture, and in post-processing by experimenting with different crops, and opted for this tight crop. It adheres to one of the standard rules of composition – the rule of golden thirds – which says that the main areas of interest should lie on the horizontal and/or vertical lines that divide the image in thirds. In this case, the in-focus parts of the skewers are a third of the way up the frame, and the burgers and skewers are nicely split 1/3 to 2/3 across the frame.
There’s nothing particularly special about the photograph, but even if you include the time it took for the food to be prepared and the barbeque to be warmed, I probably had this shot before the lights would even be in place for a standard commercial food photo.
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