It’s International Food Photography Day on Thursday. (No idea who gets to decide these things but it is associated with the Food Photographer of the Year, which is itself sponsored by an apple.) There’s an opportunity to win a nifty Fujifilm X-E2 camera kit but otherwise it seems like an opportunity to share pictures with the world’s food photo community. The theme is ‘Snap the Rainbow!’, which translates as capturing the colors of food. So far the Facebook page has an assortment of pictures, some that seem good enough to grace the pages of Food and Wine magazine, though my favorite is of an egg yolk that fell out of a slaughtered hen resting in the grass. To enter, pictures have to be posted by November 14, noon GMT (4 am here).
A recent-ish Wired article looked at the food photography craze and reported that now everyone was doing it “true artists” were breaking “stifling” conventions, which seemed to amount to people creating a narrative out of a number of pictures, pulling dishes apart to photograph elements and channeling Cézanne for Instagram posts. Apparently some (unnamed) chefs like to see how their food has been shot as it stretches “their thinking about what constitutes a successful dish”—though you would hope that how the thing tastes might be as important.
In terms of shear spectacle nothing beats Nathan Myhrvold’s food photography for his ground-breaking, six-volume Modernist Cuisine (the pictures alone are repackaged in the slightly more affordable The Photography of Modernist Cuisine). Myhrvold and his team use close ups and special techniques that show pans sliced in half and vegetables in mid flip to create some amazing images. But he’s also like the rest of us and uses a phone camera when out and about—his top tip when photographing food is to sit where there is good light, or failing that, have a supplementary light source (he carries a flash light); in a pinch, the back of a menu can be drafted to act as a reflector to add light to a scene.
