Photography Tutorials: Food

Selling baked goods online is almost as challenging as selling art: how do you make a customer fall in love with your cookies when they can’t smell them baking or see their yummy goodness in person? The answer, as always, is in the photography.

This was a tough assignment, but someone had to do it! I asked Tracy, the owner of Once Upon a Cookie (who, by the way, bakes the most ridiculously delicious cookie that you’ll ever eat in your life) to “lend” me a few samples to shoot for this tutorial.

In my humble opinion, the best images are the ones that let the cookies speak for themselves. No props, no busy background, no weird staging. These are cookies. You eat them. End of story.

1. Resist the temptation to photograph from far away. Get up close, use the macro function on your camera, and show people just how yummy these things really are.



2. Get creative with the layout. Shoot in a way that makes your product interesting, yet still shows the detail.



3. This happened quite by accident, but I’m certainly grateful to my two-year-old for showing me another great way to photograph food. A chubby little hand grabbing the cookie is a perfect way to show the scale of the item (Tracy’s cookies are mammoth, by the way) and gets the point across - these are too good to resist!



Keep your background clean and white (colours are distracting and the wrong ones can actually be unappetizing), find a natural light source, and get up close and personal with your food!

(I don’t know what happened to Tracy’s cookies after this photo shoot. They seem to have disappeared. How very odd...)

Written my Michelle of MKCPhotography