Although I still love my sweeping landscapes and architectural treasures, the main thing that has been occupying me lately is food photography. It's been a bit of a learning process, in part because I've had to put a lot more thought and effort into lighting than I would in travel photography (where I generally just use natural light or, if pressed, a flash). For example, in this photo of a sandwich, I was still relying on ambient light in my kitchen.
Not the worst photo ever, but the dark shadows on the plate and reflection of the overhead light make it look a bit sloppy. Not every photo using ambient lighting was a mess--I was happy with the photos below that use my kitchen's ambient light, for example--but I realized that I was going to need more control over the lighting situation, so I invested in two continuous softbox studio lights, and it's made life much easier.
Learning to take decent food photos has also been a learning process because, unlike wandering around from beautiful site to beautiful site when traveling, I've also discovered it's hard to get a nice variety of photos without becoming a collector of eclectic dishes and cutlery. Nonetheless, after a few bargain finds and a few splurges, plus some adventures with online tutorials for making backdrops and hours in the garden with some spray paint, I've ended up with a good mix of props and backdrops. Here are a few examples of the homemade backdrops in action:
Finally, I've had to give a lot more thought to composition in terms of staging my shots. In travel photography, of course, you frame your shot carefully, move around to test different angles, etc., but I've never, for example, thought deeply about whether or not I needed to add a salt shaker in the background of a photo of the Eiffel Tower. Too much attention to little details and the food photo looks staged or, worse yet, cluttered. Too little and it can end up looking boring or flat. In this photo of a quinoa stew, for example, I think the scattered dry quinoa ended up looking quite messy, and I gave too little attention to whether the colors were complementary:
Even temperature of the food can make a difference. I generally like to shoot food just after cooking/before eating, but some foods (hearty stews, for example) are easier to style when they're cold. I photographed both this lentil and kidney bean chili and this chickpea stew when they were cold because they held their structure and enabled me to better-capture the texture while cold:
