Commercial advertising photography is an essential ingredient in a marketing campaign, especially where food, cooking and dining is concerned. Restaurants and hotels in particular are always very keen to make sure that their food looks as appealing in the commercial photographs as it does when served up on a plate. You may well be forgiven for assuming that as long as the food is cooked well and presented as professionally as one might expect in a top class hotel that taking a photograph of it was the easy bit.
To some extent, taking a photograph of food is easy, but of course the difficult part is to make sure that the food still looks as good on film as it does on the plate. Unfortunately as many amateur photographers have found to their cost, this isn't necessarily the case. In fact any restaurant or hotel which has taken their own in house advertising photographs in order to save money will be sorely disappointed with the quality. It seems quite unfair that something so delicious should be so difficult to photograph.
For example, let's take a nice roast Sunday lunch, steaming hot, with gravy poured over the wonderful plate of food. A few photographs and the job is done, or so you might think. The problem is that when you look at the photographs several things seem to be missing. First of all, the steam has gone. When the meal was presented to you it was steaming hot, literally, but the problem with steam is that it doesn't actually last very long, and often it will disappear in seconds once the plate is served up. So how do professional commercial product photographers manage to get such fantastic pictures of food which looks so hot?
One of the inside trade secrets is actually cotton wool balls. By soaking these in water and then popping them in the microwave it is possible to place these surreptitiously behind items on the plate, creating wonderful plumes of steam which last for ages and produce steam dense enough to come out in the photograph. So next time you see a professional photograph of a steaming plate of food, you'll be less taken with the idea of tucking in to a plate of cotton wool.
The gravy is another problem though, because on the plate it looks wonderful, but in photographs it looks fairly bland - a bit like muddy water perhaps. How do professional commercial photographers achieve the glossy, appetising look? The answer is that they don't use gravy. The gravy in commercial advertising photography images is nothing more than ordinary grade motor oil. So with motor oil poured lovingly over a plate of cotton wool buds it's rapidly becoming clear that a commercial product photographer is not actually taking a photograph of a plate of food in order to produce a photograph of a plate of food.
Clearly this is where the amateurs are going wrong, and why those hotels and restaurants who do employ the services of professional photographer manage to have advertising images which look so appetising and appealing that people's mouths are drooling even before they've sat down. From deodorant aerosols used to add a frosty look to grapes, to hairspray which can make cake look moist, and from toothpicks holding items of food in just the right position to mashed potato squirted under the skin of poultry to make it look extra plump and tender, commercial product photography is not about taking quality photographs of products, but creating images which represent or suggest the product itself, which often means making the camera lie, just to recreate what would otherwise be seen for real. Does the camera lie? Yes, but only to ensure a more accurate image.
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