Taking Food Photos at Restaurants

In food photography, lighting is everything.  The camera doesn't really matter in comparison.  As I am starting to get serious in this craft, I try to figure out the cheapest possible ways to take the best pictures.

I was having dinner at Ruby Tuesday the other night.  I took my Ricoh GX200 with me.  Lighting in most restaurants is terrible and they don't appreciate you using your camera flash.  In general, flashing directly at the food often results in too much light and the details of an image are lost.

Without using the camera flash and when the lighting is inadequate, I had to increase the ISO sensitivity on the camera.  Unfortunately in my opinion this camera produces fairly grainy images at ISO sensitivity 800 or above, even with noise reduction on.  It is best to leave the ISO sensitivity at 400.

I usually use the A (Aperture) mode on my cameras.  To avoid blurring the food image too much, I try to set the F stop on the Ricoh GX200 to a high number (for example, above 6).  However, the shutter speed will need to increase when the f stop is relatively low.  Any shutter speed higher than 1/60 seconds may result in shaky camera images.  The only solution is to put the camera on a steady surface and take the pictures.  This time I brought a very small tripod that looks like an octopus:

It is a very cheap tripod that I bought in a local camera accessory store.  It allows me to put my Ricoh GX200 on it and shoot steady images especially in low-light situations.  I set the self timer to 2 seconds to avoid having to press the shutter, which may result in shaking the camera.

I wanted to take pictures of the full rack ribs I ordered.  However, the ribs were dark.  I didn't like the picture because I could hardly see the texture on the ribs:

I gave my Nokia E63 to my girlfriend.  She took out her Nokia E63 at the same time and turned on the flash lights on the phones.  These flash lights are constant light sources.  After shining the flash lights on the ribs, I shot the ribs again and this time the texture was clearly visible:

I used the same technique and shot the smashed potatoes:

Although the shadows might be a bit too much, the pictures were bright and clear.  One can also be more creative and bounces strong lights off from a white napkin to soften the lights further.

The lesson to learn here is that lighting is important in food photography especially in low-light situations such as in restaurants.  Try to be creative about the light sources.

Finally, I want to thank Ruby Tuesday for letting customers take pictures of their food.