How you can achieve the most flavoursome food photography

If you’re in food and drink marketing, you’re selling the sizzle. Your customers aren’t buying 10 beef burgers – they’re purchasing ten juicy, beefy, meaty mouth filling morsels of bovine succulence. Customers want to know it’ll be delicious. And people eat with their eyes, which makes food photography one of the most powerful techniques for getting attention.

A picture says a thousand words. So ask yourself what your current food photography is saying about your products. Is it capturing the glint on a glass of Glenlivet, or the fizz on the first Gin and Tonic of the afternoon? If it’s not, your drink sales might be flat.

Sell them the slurp. Get the photographer to take a crisp, close up of the glass that’ll be just a few inches from their customer’s face, and the brown peaks on the pie that they’ll be breaking a spoon into. If you wouldn’t eat in the dark, make sure the lighting is just right. Every advert you show the customer is a window into a dinner party held by your company. It needs the right ambience, and the food’s got to look fabulous like a host inviting the morsels into their mouths.

In marketing speak, this all part of the ritual of product use. If you can capture the moment on film when someone who is standing a foot away from a buffet says to themselves ‘ooh that looks tasty’, then people will live that feeling vicariously though the food photography. It’s a lot to accomplish on the side of a cardboard box. That's why there’s so much skill to food photography.

Did you know that people avoid blue foods because very little that is naturally blue is edible? Meanwhile, people are more drawn to red, because it’s the colour of antioxidants and juicy, sweet fruits. What’s more, the greater amount of white space around food and drink in an advert, the higher class it seems. Due to the value which we attach to scarcity, people assume pricier foods are tastier, and so setting is paramount.

Of course, Graham Precey understands all this, which is why your food will sizzle under his lens.

Editor’s Note: Precey.com (http://www.precey.com) are represented by the search engine advertising and digital marketing specialists Jumping Spider Media. Email: info@jumpingspidermedia.co.uk or call: +44 (0)20 3070 1959 / +34 952 783 637.