Food Styling: Image Orientation

Food Styling and Image Orientation in your Food Photography | www.jonathanthompsonphotography.com

A Quick Tip On Image Orientation

Hi fellow foodists, here’s another quick food photography tip to take into your weekend. I’m going to quickly talk about food styling and how it affects your image orientation.

This tip on image orientation may seem very simple, and I suppose it is, but you’d be surprised how many times people tell me they hadn’t thought of it.

Food Styling and Image Orientation in your Food Photography | www.jonathanthompsonphotography.com

There you are, ready and eager to make some stunning food shots. You have a beautiful main subject, you even have a bit of a theme and story in your mind. All your props are at the ready and the light, today, is beeeeeeeautiful.

Before you get carried away putting everything together, your do-dahs here and pretty whatsnames there. Think about what orientation you are planning to shoot. The image orientation can be dictated by a whole host of things. Most often it’s down to where and how you’re going to use the image. For example, Debs (Mrs.T) likes to have mostly vertical or portrait orientation over on Salted Mint. Perhaps you’re creating an image you want to use as a banner for Facebook, which will need to be horizontal or landscape orientation. D’ya kind of see where I’m coming from, make sense?

 

Next, select your camera position. This is where you’ll need to look at the scene in order to style it. There’s really no point building a beautiful shot from a point of view which the camera isn’t going to see. Always go back to camera position to see how it all looks. Even better, get your camera in position and use the live view screen to see the scene. If you don’t have the live view option simply look through the viewfinder to get an idea of the scene.

Image Orientation, Back Lighting, Chicken Pot Pie, www.jonathanthompsonphotography.com

Once the image orientation and camera position are decided, it makes your job of styling a wee bit easier. You have your light source, your table and your favourite shooting surface laid out. Now all you do is style, keeping in mind which orientation you’re shooting in. Landscape/horizontal is wider and shorter, while portrait/vertical is narrower and taller. This is the same whether you’re shooting top down or at an angle.

Image Orientation, Chocolate tart by Milk & Honey

That’s all for today, told you it was a quick tip..  🙂 As always, if there’s anything specific I can help you with in further posts, pop it in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you.

Have a great weekend

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