World-renowned food photographer Lou Manna shares tips for taking top-notch photos of your holiday meals–or any meal.

Photo copyright Lou Manna

By Steven J. Barry

steven@askthephotographer.com

Of all holidays, Thanksgiving is of course the one most closely associated with food. While it may not be the food that brings us together, it is the food that we gather around–the centerpiece of the celebration.

For many people it seems natural to take a photo of the feast they prepare, so that they can later be reminded both of their hard work and the time spent enjoying the special meal with loved ones. Most of the time, however, food photographs taken in haste must later be accompanied with an explanation to the effect of, “Well, it might not look that great here, but it was actually really good.”

But if you can muster forth a bit of additional effort and keep in mind a few principles when taking photos of your prized meal, your images can come out looking appetizing and far more representative of what your taste buds experienced, says New York photographer Lou Manna.

While Manna has shot all sorts of imagery during his extensive career, he’s become famous for his food photographs. Manna has mastered the nuances–particularly in the crucial area of lighting–of taking good food photos. As evidence of that, he’s sought after: His food photos have appeared in some 40 cookbooks and he regularly shoots for big players in the food industry, such as Betty Crocker, Kraft, Welch’s, Kellogg’s and Grey Poupon, among dozens of others.

Photo copyright Lou Manna

“Once you can light food, you can light anything,” Manna said.

He said almost nothing else has such a variety of textures.

“It’s got the most complexity of surfaces and shapes, as opposed to say fashion (where) in a way, you’re just dealing with flesh tone and fabric.”

Growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, food was always an important part of his family and social life. He said food began to take a prominent role in his professional life when he started working as a photographer for The New York Times, focusing on feature stories.

“I was sent out right off the bat to the home of Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey,” Manna said. Claiborne was a widely read restaurant critic and former food editor of The New York Times. Franey was a famed French chef and wrote a “60 Minute Gourmet” column for the Times. The pair worked closely together and were among the biggest names in food during their day.

“I embraced this opportunity to work with these masters, and had a great time doing it,” Manna said.

Photo copyright Lou Manna

While Manna ended up shooting anything from areal photographs to presidential functions, he said much of the time his assignments leaned more toward the presidential function end of the spectrum. Thus, he was frequently sent to the restaurants and homes of high-end chefs.

He worked for the Times for 15 years before opening his own studio on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan. While he doesn’t get to dawdle and his photojournalism background still has him shooting more quickly than other studio photographers, he doesn’t have to worry about the looming 5 p.m. deadline, which is something he did have on his mind while at the Times.

Manna has a few slices of advice for the aspiring food photographer. In fact, he’s even authored a book on the subject titled, “Digital Food Photography.”

Making food shots look good can be trickier than other types of photography, but taking full advantage of the digital age can help smooth out the learning curve, he said.

Photo copyright Lou Manna

Manna arrived there earlier than most. He bought his first digital camera in 1995–a one-megapixel Nikon E-2–for $15,000. While most of the world waited until after the turn of the millennium to switch to digital full-time, Manna did so in 1998 when he switched to the Olympus system, shooting first with the 4-megapixel E-1. He’s stuck with Olympus ever since, and is now one of 17 photographers in the Olympus Visionary Program.

Manna said he now shoots with his E-3 tethered to a TV so he can get instant feedback, and recommends that amateur shooters find a little TV and do the same with their cameras.

Setting up an appetizing plate

The work actually begins with food preparation.

Manna almost always works with professional food stylists. For those who don’t have access to a stylist, Manna recommends simply working with someone who knows what they’re doing in the kitchen. Then, there are a few important principles to keep in mind.

“The first rule of thumb is to undercook the food. Most people cook the food as if they were about to eat it,” Manna said. “In a food photograph, we actually undercook everything.”

You’ll also want to consider painting on a bit of oil or kitchen bouquet–a browning agent. The oil is for shine and glisten, and the kitchen bouquet adds color and tone.

He said food texture is paramount. Fully cooked pasta sticks together, flattens out and looks mushy. Fully cooked broccoli loses its structure and its vibrant green color. Fully cooked turkey or chicken can wrinkle up too much.

Also important: “Employ different cooking techniques in the different elements on a plate of food.” Manna said that if all the foods are, say, broiled, “The plate will end up looking too homogenous, like you microwaved it in the broiler.”

Photo copyright Lou Manna

“Grill the salmon, boil the broccoli so it’ll still have that green color, and then maybe sauté the potatoes so they have some oiliness and different texture to it than everything else,” Manna said.

Manna said picking foods with complementing–rather than competing–aesthetic qualities can make a plate look more appealing. If you’ve got a plate with string beans and asparagus, for example, you might want to consider a more contrasting combination such as string beans and carrots, or asparagus and cauliflower.

“You can’t just look at a recipe and think, ‘Oh that would be good to eat,’ and think it’ll make a good photograph,” he said.

Keep the same sort of thing in mind when selecting dishware, he said. A photo of a muffin, for example, might look more interesting on a square plate rather than a round one.

“You want to pick something that helps portray the mood or the style of the meal or the setting. Sometimes we’ll go casual, sometimes we’ll go elegant, some we’ll go modern, sometimes we’ll go paper plates,” Manna said.

Other important things to keep in mind when setting up your plate are to clean up grease and even thumbprints with Q-tips or paper towels, and try to keep the elements on your plate from lining up too neatly–use tweezers to criss cross the ends of those asparagus. Also, both on your plate and around it, avoid too much clutter in your shot.

Lighting

All the preparation in the world could be for naught if you don’t light your food well. Manna said harsh, head-on lighting can instantly rob any image of its depth.

“The trick to any kind of photography, not only food photography, is not to light it head on. Don’t use the flash on the camera. That’s the biggest mistake,” Manna said.

Even if you don’t have access to studio lights, Manna said you can still achieve high-quality effects by placing just a few desk lamps in key locations.

“In general, whether it’s a flash or table lamp, a window or any other light source, my recommendation is to put it on the left side,” Manna said, adding that he places his light sources at almost 90 degrees. “In general we read from left to right, and I like the light to give your eye that same visual flow.”

Above: A diagram Manna arranged showing the placement of his lights for a tart.

Manna also employs mirrors – in fact, he’s coming out with his own complete Lou Manna Mirror Kit, he said – to add “specular highlights” to his food. Specular highlights is a term Manna coined to describe the small, rounded areas of light that can “make it glisten and sparkle like a jewel.”

He also mentioned the importance of diffusing light to soften its effect on food. At home, amateur food shooters could use something as simple as layers of wax paper to diffuse light from a desk lamp.

Manna mentioned the example of photographing a piece of chocolate cake with a dollop of whipped cream on it.

“With that contrast range, if you just lit it without any diffusion and any consideration for the object, the white would be overexposed and the black would be underexposed,” he said.

Above: The tart as shot with the above-drawn lighting setup.

Instead, he recommended diffusing light that would hit the whipped cream so as to allow more of its texture to be revealed, and using low, angled light focused on the cake to bring out its detail.

Photographing the turkey

Of course, pulling out an undercooked turkey, basting on a browning agent and whisking the meal away into your at-home studio might not fly with the Thanksgiving Day chef.

Thankfully, Manna said you can still get high-quality shots of fully cooked food, so long as you’re a bit more careful about the display. For a turkey, he recommends cooking it slowly and pinning the skin back a bit using push-pins, a technique food stylists use to give turkey or chicken a quick “face lift.” He also recommended using a gold reflector to add a bit of warmth.

An at-home lighting set up can be whisked away fairly quickly, and at that point you can settle in and enjoy your meal, confident that you’ve recorded it and everyone will remember it fondly.

And perhaps in the future, those images can remind you of those precious times spent with friends and family around you.

Above: A lighting setup Lou Manna devised using a table lamp, a goose-neck desk lamp, waxed paper, mirrors and aluminum foil.

Below: The results.

All photos copyright Lou Manna.

Lou Manna is an award winning Olympus Visionary photographer whose work has appeared in national ad campaigns, major magazines, and more than forty books. After shooting for the New York Times from 1975 to 1990, he went on to establish his own Fifth Avenue studio, where he works with corporate, advertising and public relations clients to create photos that can only be described as “exquisite.” He has a sense of style, color and composition with an inherent sense of beauty. Lou recently authored his first book, “Digital Food Photography,” the only book on the art of food photography devoted exclusively to digital technology. He is currently teaching digital food photography workshops and private hands on classes in his studio. Learn more about his work at www.loumanna.com. Also, check out more of his photography tips at www.digitalfoodphotos.com/blog. Additionally, click here to learn about his contest “Best Food Photos of 2009.”

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