Honesty in Organic Food Photography

 

Honesty in Organic Food Photography

Organic food photography can help any restaurant, hotel or even recipe book promote what they have to offer by offering mouthwatering natural photographs – but they must be honest! They must be natural and show your customers what they will get, and not some touched-up representation. Organic vegetable look very natural, and so they should, and they also tend to show good color when photographed.

However, even if you don’t use organic food, there are few doubts that good, professional food photography is an excellent way to promote food-based products. If you decide to use it, though, it must look good, and a lot of photographers, particularly amateurs, are unable to represent food as looking mouthwateringly delicious and ready to eat.

Menu Photographs Sell

Let’s say you run a restaurant, and have the usual descriptive menu. Many restaurants print their own menus these days, using Word or a graphics application. The can make good-looking menus, but they always appear to keep it written with little or no graphics. What’s wrong with adding small thumbnail photographs of each dish beside the listing? Your customers will then know what they are getting.

Even better: feature photos of selected dishes on your window or door, and you will likely find more customers walking in, attracted by the sight of that wonderful food. The two senses that sell your food are sight and smell. That’s one reason why most bakeries and patisseries display their food at the counter – people buy using their eyes! In-store baking isn’t just there for convenience – fresh bread looks and tastes good, but most of all it smells fabulous, and who can walk past a bakery and ignore the delicious smells coming from it.

Organic Vegetables Photograph Well

With food photography, particularly organic food photography that allows the natural foods to speak for themselves, you have the next best thing to smell – sight. Organic vegetables look especially good, particularly when photographed in natural light. One example is carrots. It’s the carotenoids and other phytochemicals in carrots that make organic carrots so richly colored with that strong orangey-red color that natural carrots have but that many chemically fed carrots lack.

The problem with a lot of food photography is that it does not show the food naturally. It looks too glossy or ‘artificial’. Many photographers achieve this by spraying the food with gelatin that gives it a glossy look, and the lighting is often false. There are many tricks used by some photographers that will present good-looking food, but when the customer gets the real thing, they are disappointed because it doesn’t look like the photograph.

There is no need to do this. Food looks great as it comes, and all a photographer has to do is to photograph it in natural light without all the props to make it look false. Don’t airbrush the slight flaws on the vegetables, and don’t add extra pink to the prawns or redden up the lobsters or carrots.

Honesty Pays in Food Photography

If you have good quality food it will look good without any enhancements. You will be able to show your food on your menu or window, or even on your restaurant walls, and your customers will get what they see. It’s better doing that than attracting them with something beautifully colored and glossed-up, and then giving them real food that looks different. They will complain and you might even lose their custom.

Natural organic food photography, presented honestly, shows your customers exactly what they are getting: it still looks great and mouth-wateringly delicious, and your diners will be happy. They will be more likely then to return to try one of the other dishes they see – the eyes and noses buy your food, not the written word or even a verbal description. Showing them a photograph is all you have to do. It works – but it must be real!

 

 

Tagged as: Food photography, Organic Food Photography