PHOT-001: Food Photography by Sony Final Thoughts

It’s hard to believe that I’m wrapping  up my final week of my food photography class through Social Fabric University. I’m a few more critiques and a final portfolio away from finishing up the class. I’ve really enjoyed learning more about  how to improve my food photography skills. The feedback has been extremely valuable for me. Watching everyone expand their skills – myself included – has been fun.

As with many first time classes, there have been a variety of bumps in the technology road. It’s been a learning experience for those of us involved as well as those presenting the course. I know that the presenters will take the things they learned from our beta class and make the class much better for future classes.

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about in the last couple of weeks is using different angles and simple backdrops (like scrapbook paper) to add interest to a photo. Just a few simple tweaks and adding some scrapbook paper took some ordinary pictures and added that extra pop of interest.

I’ve also really learned the importance of proper lighting, shadows, and focus. While I don’t have that down perfectly, I am making strides in the right direction. I look forward to continuing to practice the techniques that I’ve learned in this class as I want to continue to improve. Looking at the work of others has really helped me to expand my own skills. The creativity of other students from the class has inspired me to look at food from different perspectives.

I now have a nice portfolio of food photos. I want to retake some of the photos from the beginning of the class and get rid of the bad shadows and make them much better based on the skills that I learned later in the class. The pictures are okay, but I’d like to see them much better.

I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to take this class as it will allow me to present better pictures of the food that I make and share mouth-watering photos with the recipes. We eat with our eyes prior to eating with our mouth. If it’s not appetizing for our eyes, it’s less likely that we’ll want to eat the food presented. Hopefully, the pictures that I’ll now be able to share will make you want to try the recipes that I’m sharing and/or allow you to enjoy my food posts more.

I had a hard time picking which pictures to include in my final portfolio, but these are the 5 shots from the class that made the final cut. It’s no surprise to me that they are all from the final 2 weeks of the class. It was during weeks 4 and 5 that we really focused on applying the technical aspects of photography such as angles, lighting, ISO, aperture, depth of field… to our skill set.

A huge thank you to Social Fabric University for allowing me to be part of this beta PHOT-001: Food Photography by Sony class.