Pittsburgh doesn’t have a huge market for editorial food photography, but there are a few outlets. Table Magazine, Pittsburgh Magazine, Whirl Magazine, The local news papers, and a few others are pretty much all of local markets that I can think of, and many of those buyers, I honestly don’t know a whole lot about. I’d like to, but at the moment, I’m rather clueless… The one local magazine that I have worked for in the past, shooting editorial food and people photography, is Pittsburgh Magazine. The shots below are were used as cover and inside photos for the magazine and are pretty good examples of editorial food photography.
The files you’re looking at are the images before they were cropped for reproduction. All three of these images have a similar theme, the blown out backgrounds. This is a technique that I use to make my editorial food photos look more attractive. This way I can make the images look as though they’re in an environment, that might actually be the restaurant (for two of the shots) or in an actual kitchen (for the waffle shot).
These images are old, but some of my favorites, but as I look at these photos, I’m noticing that the camera angle tends to be from a similar angle, and for editorial photos, that’s not a good thing or even a common thing… I’ll have to keep that in mind as I build my portfolio in the future. I guess the reason that I keep coming back to the same camera angle, is because the angle “works”. The angle I usually shoot from is the one that I found displays the food to its best advantage, showing the thickness and texture, better than other possible camera angles. In advertising, that’s a good idea, but in editorial food photography, where there’s usually a larger quantity of photos to show, shooting everything from the same angle gets to appear a little boring after a few shots… With advertising food photography, we usually just shoot a shot or two and with so few pictures, repetition usually isn’t an issue.
I’ll be back with more samples and discussion on Pittsburgh editorial food photography shortly. There are more issues I’d like to discuss and photos to show you…
This food photo ended up being the cover of Pittsburgh Magazine
Here's another example of editorial food photography that I shot for Pittsburgh Magazine
Here's another expmple fo editorial food photography. Notice how the lighting makes the environment somewhat vague...
