The Pro Guide to Taking Better Instagram Food Photos

Left: This is not a bad attempt at capturing the "meat fruit" at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner. Right: This version is much better, though, and it would be cooler if you posted only the second shot rather than subjecting people to the various fails you had before getting it right. We’ve heard rumors that the iPhone camera function takes higher quality images than the Instagram app, so you’ll see better end results by snapping the photo first, then uploading to Instagram. Ruben isn’t sure this is actually true, but she does have a more compelling reason for following this two-step process: “Using your camera phone allows you to take a photo more quickly, and to take a few in succession and then decide which works best later; you don't want to self-edit in real time by posting everything to Instagram as you take it.” If you’re going through the steps of snapping and posting each of your shots in Instagram, you’ll not only become that aggravating person who’s holding up the meal (more on that later), but your feed will also become a trail of struggle. Real photographers don’t publish every shot they take, and neither should you. Snap discretely, then work with what you’ve got at a more opportune moment.  

Left: A candle between you and the subject is certainly romantic, but it fills the frame with too much light and causes glare. Right: Moving the candle slightly, so that it is behind your iPhone, yet still casting light onto the bottle, will rectify the problem. If you were taking a photo of your friends outside, you wouldn't position them with their backs to the sun—you want the sun hitting their faces, not the camera. The same concept applies when you are trying to shoot a dish or drink in a dark place. "If the main light source is coming from behind your subject, it'll be backlit and won't expose the subject properly," say Ruben. Backlighting can be cool in some circumstances (think light streaming through clear spirits bottles), but in general you want to position yourself, the shooter, between the light source and the subject. Even in a very dark bar, you can get a solid shot of your cocktail with a little manipulation of the candle placement—out of the frame, yet close enough to illuminate the subject. The brighter Instagram filters, such as "Amaro" and "Walden," can help bolster the light even more.  

GOOD

Left: The flash will cause all sorts of unattractive reflections on glass, and it can wash out the colors of food. Right: Finding natural light, whether it's a garden, a window, or a candle at the table (see next slide for more on that), will almost always result in a better shot.  Harsh light—i.e., that obnoxious flash on your iPhone—tends to do bad things to food. “Meat looks shiny and unappetizing, and cheese looks congealed and plastic-y,” says Ruben. The key is to use the flash as a fill light rather than the main light source. In other words, if some light is coming from behind you and illuminating the dish, but it’s still a bit too dark, you can use the flash to bolster the existing light. But when the flash becomes the only source of light, you’ll end up with that ugly spotlight effect that makes it look like the food is attempting a jailbreak. First We Feast columnist Dieselboy—a crack food Instragrammer in his own right—taught us another trick. If you're in a dark restaurant, have a friend hold his or her lit screen above the dish (or even use a flashlight app) to create a softer spotlight. He took the shot below at wd~50 using this technique:  

GOOD

  Whatever you do, just don't play yourself with shiny-meat syndrome:  

BAD

 

Left: A dessert at a Lebanese restaurant looks more like a character from Monsters Inc. when you meddle with it too much. Right: The oyster pan roast at the John Dory, like so many dishes, looks best when you can capture it as naturally as possible. "Beautiful food, like portraits, should be treated delicately," says Ruben. You wouldn’t want to add too much contrast or focus to someone’s face, because it can make them look severe or inhuman. “You can apply the same vanity to food." Ruben breaks it down further: “The trend in food photography these days is to use a wide aperture to achieve a shallow depth of field, which works best with natural light. Not that you have to be on trend, but following this approach can produce great results on Instragram.” One pro tip for achieving this type of soft focus is to use the blur tool to you advantage: “You can mimic the effect of a wide-aperture camera by directing the viewer’s eye to the subject of your shot, and away from anything that may distract from it.” However, there are some caveats, which brings us to the next slide...  

Natural light = good.

Left: Drawing attention to one hot dog on the table doesn't work if there are others on the same plane, because the manipulation of the image is too obvious. Right: It's almost always better to set up your shot in a more natural way rather than trying to force the viewer's eye. Using the blur tool is a great way to draw the viewer’s eye to something that you want to highlight—those glistening coins of housemade sausage on top of a pizza, or a plump marshmallow floating in some hot chocolate. But Ruben advises that it is too often used as a crutch to try to stylize a bad photo. Two key things to keep in mind:

1. Get used to thinking of it as a blur tool, not a focus tool—the effect does not clarify what’s inside the part of the image that you highlight, but simply pulls everything around it out of focus. So remember that whatever you want to single out should be in focus in your original shot—you can’t use it to correct an out-of-focus photo.
2. If you are going to highlight detail, make sure other objects/ingredients on the same plane are also in focus. “When two objects are on the same plane, they are at the same focal length, so it doesn't make sense that one would be in focus and one wouldn't be,” explains Ruben. “The eye would be confused by this and not accept it as a natural image.”

Rather than heavy-handed manipulation, what tends to work best is a gentle blurring of the fringes of your photo, to steer the viewer's eye without making them think about the technique. Here are a couple of successful examples:    

Left: If the heirloom tomatoes at the market catch your eye, take all the time you want to line up a shot and capture the colors. Right: But if your friends are waiting to get busy on a hot BBQ spread, fall back and don't try to style the perfect shot. Whatever you do, don’t be the douche at the table who stops everyone from digging into their grub to snap the perfect 'gram. “I feel like people totally ruin fun moments when they yell ‘Instagram this!’ or ‘take a picture!’—it makes the moment feel fake, and sort of like it's all just for show," says Ruben. "I think there's a fine line with Instagram between documenting and curating.” Ultimately, the goal is to be respectful to both the restaurant and your dining companions. Having a fun and stress-free meal with your friends in real-time is way more important than getting those digital “likes.”

Aside from thirst-baiting selfies and photos of cats, there's surely nothing more popular on Instagram than food. Indeed, snapping photos at the table has become such an epidemic that some restaurants have even taken measures to ban cellphones. We have mixed feelings about the impulse to document every dish set in front of us, but we're not going to front like we don't love some good food porn. Furthermore, Instagram allows us to keep tabs on where—and what—friends are eating in a way that's a lot more engaging than 140-character Twitter reviews. The real problem, though, is that a huge amount of the food captured on Instagram looks horrible because people have no idea what they're doing with their iPhones. To help raise the bar, we called up our friend Jolie Ruben—photo editor at Spin, and a very talented food photographer—to share her tips on how to make grub looks delicious on Instagram. After a couple nights on the town experimenting, we were able to come up with some examples of what works, what doesn't, and how you should think about Instagram etiquette in restaurants.     So before you snap that next double cheeseburger, imagine Ruben swooping into your view-finder and reminding you of these rules. Class is in session...