Feast for the Eyes

Professional Food Photography

Photo: © Mark Floro

Shoot food photographs that sell the product without accompanying text descriptions.

The way to a person's stomach is through their eyes, which is why there is so much demand nowadays for mouth-watering food photography among food establishments and food products. Whether you shoot food for a living or for your Mom and Pop chop-and-chew shop, you will benefit from this workshop, where renowned food photographer Mark Floro cooks up a generous serving of professional techniques and trade secrets for making pictures look good enough to eat. Even the finest cuisine is like a beautiful model: it, too, must be made up, prepped, and lit properly to look mouth watering in a photo.

What will be covered

• Equipment needed, from camera and lenses, lights, to inexpensive widgets
• Introduction to Food Styling and Food Photography Techniques
• Some fundamental composition rules and creative styles
• Participants will experience and play with at least four (4) different basic lighting techniques
• Minimum lecture time by the instructor and maximum shooting time for the participants
• Critique of some of the participantsÕ images on the second day
• Sculpting food with light in order to bring out the foodÕs color, texture, form, shape, and lines
• Basic food styling and food prep techniques will be shared and demonstrated: grill marks, fake ice cream, fake ice cubes, coloring and more
• Simple Photoshop techniques that help solve some food photography problems
• Problems, solutions, and workarounds
• The business side of food photography

Who should attend

• Commercial photographers doing work for advertising and food packaging
• Photographers planning to specialize in food photography
• Amateur photographers and food stylists who want to broaden their skill set
• Business owners, managers in the food industry
• In-house staff of food establishments in charge of preparing displays, menus, and sales materials
• Trainee and professional chefs
• Culinary professionals
• Food bloggers and writers
• Food consultants
• Foodies

Prerequisites

Participants should have attended the PCCI Basic Photography workshop, or have equivalent experience in photography

What to bring

• Digital camera with manual exposure control, and preferably but not necessarily, with a PC socket for external flash
• Lens that can fill the frame with a single entree on a regular-sized plate
• Lots of memory cards, batteries and a battery charger
• Tripod is highly recommended. (Lighting will be continuous light, not strobe. Definitely, long exposure will be needed. Tripod will prevent camera shake)
• Recommended: Laptop with a program for viewing and selecting uploaded images (the camera's included application will be sufficient). Laptop will be beneficial also if participant has limited memory card capacity. Please advise the front office if you cannot bring a laptop.

Instructor

You yourself must have fallen under the spell of Mark Floro's magic somewhere, at some time: when you were drawn into a restaurant or picked up a food product displaying a photograph Mark took. Close to 35 years in the advertising & commercial industry, he has photographed for the menus, outdoor and counter displays, print ads, posters, and packaging of Chow King, Red Ribbon, Greenwich, Jollibee, Mang Inasal, Tokyo Tokyo, Nestle, Magnolia, Fruits & Ice Cream, San Miguel, Purefoods, Selecta, Universal Robina, Pizza Hut, Unilever, and of course his wife's Italian specialty restaurant, Buon Giorno!

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