Food photography is going to be called for in many situations. When a restaurant opens up, when somebody is throwing an event, when a pub wants to begin offering food as part of their service offering… however, is there enough demand to make a career from food photography?

It all depends on how many clients you are able to secure. It is never going to be especially secure work running your own photography business or working as a freelance photographer. This is because it is a supply and demand business. If the demand goes down for whatever reason, you business could be in the firing line.

If you are really good about what you do and passionate about both food and photography, it can be a viable career option. Make sure you have an excellent portfolio and become the go-to person in your area. Make sure you’re skilled in other areas of photography as well to make your services more appealing.

Portraits are photographs of people and they are usually close up. A portrait is traditionally a serious type of image but more recently, people have started to have fun family portraits taken. As a photographer, taking a good portrait photograph is a unique skill.

You should start off by using the portrait mode on a digital camera. This gives you less to worry about so that you can focus on getting the right angle and encouraging the right facial expressions out of your subject. Once you know what you’re doing, you may choose to do it manually.

Taking a portrait is a good skill to have. You can take photographs of people, friends and family, making them into beautiful images that really mean something. It’s great for commercial work as lots of people want portraits with their family. Just be careful to choose a suitable setting and background as you don’t want to distract from the model.

Food may seem like one of the easiest objects to photograph, but it’s not necessarily that simple. You’ll need to practice as much as you can to get the right angle, emphasise the right parts and create interest in a potentially rather plain image. If you get good at it though, there are a number of functions it could serve for you. Here are some ideas for generating business for yourself:

1. Take photographs for restaurants. There are often close-up images of the food they serve displayed on their walls and in their menus, and they’ll need a good photographer to produce these for them.
2. Work for hotels. They’ll often want photographs of their breakfast food and events catering for their website and printed literature.
3. Get into advertising. Many different food-related brands will want to advertise their products and they’ll need them to look as appetising as possible. You’ll also need to know how to work with angles to make the dishes look as generous as possible.
4. Produce food packaging. Almost everything edible which is sold in a supermarket will have images of the finished product somewhere on its packaging. It’s a big industry to get into.
5. Speak to individual shops. Smaller retailers will often rely on the quality of their food to allow them to charge more for it, so they’ll need high quality images which show it off to its best potential.

Food Photography is a huge phenomenon currently, especially on photograph social network apps like Instagram. These days, it seems, we’re all food photographers: we can barely begin to eat your Nando’s without taking a photo of our chicken. On average, 60 million photos are uploaded onto Instagram just by Americans each day, with a majority of them of foods.

Many people complain of its stupidity for being popular but for restaurateurs, these pictures are no joke: People are taking a massive number of photos of food, and Instagram’s Photo Map feature instantly shows what’s being served at a restaurant, this boosts the advertisement of restaurants .If the food is gross it can photographed in lighting and processed through a filter that makes it look delicious, conversely great meals can look unappetizing when spoilt by filters, so what foods are actually nice?

Food photography on social network sites like Instagram is causing a shrinking world. The benefit of the rise of food photos is that it gets us talking about what we eat and where it comes from, the more we talk about food the better understanding we have of the food system. However, whilst we are busy taking photos of our meals, we are forgetting about the problems we have with starvation as well as hunger around the world. Infact, a recent study shows that overexposure to images of food makes you become tired of the taste of the foods you are viewing.

Food photography is not easy is as it looks; it’s not just a case of getting the food in the cameras frame and pressing the shutter. If food looks good in real life, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to look good when it’s photographed, but correct lighting can help.

Using photo studio lights can be really good, or even natural daylight, whilst making sure you set the right aperture on your camera is also important. For food photography, you want it to stand out and look good, which is why we recommend a shallow depth of field, perhaps using the lowest possible aperture your camera can handle, maybe F2.1.

This can create a blurred background effect whilst keeping the food itself in focus, and that’s exactly what you want. And with adequate lighting you’ll be able to make food look as tasty in a photograph as it does in real life, perhaps even more so in the photo editing-stage.