There’s a market out there for photographers who want to shoot food. As a pro photographer the biggest challenge is always selling yourself correctly. You can be an average photographer who is a superb salesperson and make a great living. Or you can be out of this world, a real talent in creating beautiful images but hopeless at putting you and your work out there and fail miserably in the payday department. We are a world where photos of avocados are posted online ten per second every second of every day. Is this because we all want to see lots of avocados? Of course not. But that tells you something valuable, that the subject of food is and will always be wildly popular. And you can make money photographing it.
I think Instagram deadens the visual appreciation. It’s too dense and overwhelming. There’s too much of everything. Even the great stuff, if you ever see it, is momentary in the senses, immediately displaced by another over-lit breakfast. Full discIosure, I do have a barely attended Insta page but it’s all I can do to even acknowledge that. From time to time, I purpose to try harder, post more, like more posts, comment and follow accounts in the hope that it will build my followers to a point where someone somewhere with real money to spend will contact me and commission something. But that never happens. I rarely if ever have the time to invest in the whole consuming process of Instagram or any other social media that may, just may garner business one day. It feels futile.
So, to the positive: photographing food is pleasurable. It’s a terrific subject. It doesn’t move quickly and out of focus. It’s not a person so you don’t have to make it feel relaxed and natural for the lens. I like people. I like working with people. Given how solitary much of my working life can be, with day after day spent editing in my office, it’s usually great to see people out and about or in a studio doing people things and in all manner of industry. Yet, there’s a quiet, usually unhurried, peacefulness to photographing food. Technically, it’s interesting. There are choices to be made: does this dish look better from overhead or low down? What if I only light this side of this glass of ale or what if I fire a hidden strobe from behind it and right through, illuminating those gassy bubbles and amber taint? Where will I precisely place my point of focus (because that is a biggie)? What plate or surface looks best below this lemon tart? Am I going for a mood, something rustic and “peasanty” and how do I achieve that? Weathered oak kitchen table or crisp white tablecloth or something a bit more imaginative like glass, metal or stone? There’s lots of ways to approach it.
To bring in that paid work means having a knockout portfolio to show. Here’s the good bit about food photography. Anyone can build a portfolio at home. Using just one light source, a flash with some softening modifier say, or even just natural light at the right time of day cast through a window onto a simple table and you can produce engaging images. Plan it right and it’s simple. Nobody is there to hurry you. Start with basics. Get things out of you fridge and cupboards. Photograph an apple, an egg, a tin of beans (I’ve put beans below to show what I mean). Learn what you can do with your lens or if you need a better lens. Learn what effect the light has from different angles. Most of all be brave and experiment. Find something that looks good but maybe a little different to the millions of other versions of the same thing. People like different. Our brains respond to different. Plenty of people do this anyway. They set themselves up with their smartphone and gadgets they buy off the web to make their home cooking look amazing. A simple, cheap lightbox for product and food photography can help. I’m more interested in what I can do with a proper DSLR camera of course but that’s not to say that I don’t think incredibly good images can come from simple set ups and less than pro-level gear.
Ultimately you want to make money so that leaves the bigger issue to address. Sales. Selling yourself and your work. People will not, never have and never will just come to you - in any profession. Unless you are at least semi-established with a track record you will have to start at the first step and land the first job but it is do-able. To get over this hurdle you need to tailor your approach to the people who most likely need top class images of their food and beverages. How?
Google the hell out of it. See what restaurants, hospitality companies, caterers, hotels and even simple cafes (maybe those in more salubrious neighbourhoods) are using food images on their websites. Target them. Create a gallery of your best work (doesn’t matter if it was all done at the kitchen table; they don’t know that). Make those images exceptional. That part is up to you. If you have it, you have it. If you don’t, you don’t but you can work to make your style better every day. Everyone brilliant and successful starts somewhere at some time and loads of them fake it til’ they make it. Loads. Most.
Don’t have too many images on that gallery, just enough to show variation of work and skill; about thirty shots is plenty. Make sure all those images are perfectly optimised for display and fast upload. If you don’t know how to do this, learn. There’s plenty of advice out there to show you how to create perfectly sharp, fast uploading images for the web. If someone somewhere does decide to click on the gallery link you have sent them the last thing you want is to lose that person’s interest because your images takes too long to upload. Trust me. They will give up fast if you haven’t done this correctly. Send the gallery link with a short (short!!!! I cannot emphasise this enough) and polite email making a simple enquiry about their photography needs. If you hear nothing (and you will hear nothing from 90% of people) follow this first email up with an even shorter and even more polite enquiry to see if they saw the first email. If you hear nothing again leave it alone. For now at least. Sales is a numbers and oftentimes, patience game. The results do come though.
I could go on but there’s little need. The bones of what to do are there in your power already. So start snapping your spaghetti bolognese. Then sell it to the people who need it. And don’t eat the food til’ you have the shot.
