Food Photography Louisville, KY

Do you order your meal based off of menu photos?

We do too.

The truth is, we all eat with our eyes. Food photography is about giving people beautiful, irresistible food pictures to induces desire, and stimulates the senses, and make their mouth water.

Beautiful food is big business. Every month, half of smartphone users will take at least one picture of food, and food is currently the fastest growing and most viral category on Pinterest. On Instagram, #food has nearly 200 million posts. Why? Because people love to look at food. The foodie culture across social media is on the rise, and food is a compelling force across the globe.

Attractive food is drawing tourists, locals, and leisure travelers alike to hunt down the best dining experiences across the country. Whether you run a food truck, café, bakery, catering company, online food business or a restaurant downtown, you need drool-worthy food photography to put you on the map.

Food Photo Frenzy

Taking beautiful food photography is a tricky business. If you’ve ever tried to post a picture of homemade soup with your iPhone only to realize it looks like a chunky mess, you know what we’re talking about. It takes professional food photography to put the smell of smoked meat or the taste of butter on fresh corn into a single photo.

Using state-of-the-art photography equipment makes taking beautiful pictures easier, but the skill behind the lens is always more important than the equipment you have. We bring the following essentials to every food photography project:

• Plating: How you arrange your food is all about presenting the best side. Some foods are particularly tricky to photograph. Soups, messy sandwiches, and the illusive sausage can be difficult to appear appetizing in a photo. Plating can add character to plain foods or bring simplicity to a spread. Aside from the plate itself, presentation includes napkins, utensils, glassware, other accessories bring personality and dimension to the photo. Food photography is about color, ambience, setting, and plating to bring everything together.

• Lighting: Lights are critical to making food look its best. This is the single most important criteria for good photography. Fluorescent kitchen lights are the antithesis to appetizing food photos. We try to use as much natural light as possible to give food a bright and even glow without tinting or skewing the colors at all. Bad light can remove texture, create harsh glare, or make it look like your food is floating in space. Using light to bring out your food’s good side is a technical process our food photographers have developed over years in the industry.

• Composition: A good photograph never happens by chance. It is carefully arranged, placed, and composed. A well composed picture shows you exactly what you want to see. It’s placing that perfect drip of melting cheese, a single sprinkle on a scoop of ice cream, or the juicy burger stacked tall so you can see everything at once. Composition is about framing foods and choosing angles that best suit the subject. Some foods look best shot from above while others are taken at eye level. Part of this is practice, but a bigger part is instincts from years of experience understanding what works, and what doesn’t.

• Editing: The goal of editing, or post processing is to make the photos pop, while making sure they don’t come out looking like plastic neon toys. Editing should be about enhancing the beautiful photos we already have, not to compensate for poor photography. A skilled food photographer knows how to make the whites whiter and the darks darker to adjust color for clarity and texture without compromising the integrity of the product itself.

Benefit of Professional Food Photography

Investing in great food photography is just as important for a home-based business as it is for a Zagat-rated restaurant downtown. It’s about enticing people and making a great impression on social media, websites, menus and brochures. Most food photography is shown on location where the action actually happens, we love to capture the action of putting food together in a beautiful kitchen environment, but we can also do studio photography in a more quiet, relaxed environment if you prefer.

Compare your options:

• Smartphone: While most of us have a camera in our pockets, it’s not the best option for food photos (even with a food-specific filter app). By nature, a smartphone camera washes colors out and it’s easy to lose to warm colors that are shown to stimulate appetites.
• Stock Photos: Sure, you can use a stock photo of a sandwich, but wouldn’t you rather have your customer see your world-famous pastrami on rye rather than a generic version the deli down the street might be using as well?
• DIY: Taking your own food photos might seem like a good idea in the beginning, but just because you can bake the world’s best cookie doesn’t mean you know how to take a photo of it. After countless hours, dozens of batches of fresh cookies, and neck craning attempts to get it right, we think you’ll agree that creating the perfect mouthwatering photo that showcases texture, color, and taste is best left to the professionals.

The Fusion Difference

Professional quality photography and professional quality editing to make your food stand out in today’s Foodie culture. Our professional food photography is perfect for Louisville businesses looking to attract tourists and locals alike. If you’re looking to advertise your new menu, highlight signature eats, start a restaurant, sell baked goods online, or increase your current marketing, we can help.

We love what we do, we are foodies and photographers who have a passion for making great food into beautiful photos. We work with each client to produce food photography that matches the atmosphere, feeling, and perceptions of your business. Give us a call today to get started transforming the way your customers see your food!