Photographing meat is a completely different animal than photographing beautiful veggies or fruits. How do you make meat look hot, tasty, moist, and fresh in photos? Meat can look cold, gross, dry, old, and discolored depending on how you photograph it. If you’re not careful with lighting, you’ll make a juicy chicken look like it sat for hours on a Walmart shelf.
Unless you want meat to look cold, it’s better to lightly brush the outside with some oil, and be careful with the angles of your lights. In this photo shoot, I wanted to make the chicken look sizzling HOT, floating in the air like it was resurrecting out of a pan of vegetables. I wanted it to look so hot that if you were there in real life facing the shot that your face might get cooked too.
Here is just a photo to illustrate how I lit the chicken. You can see my softbox at the bottom, it has two color gels over the flash. I decided that my Salmon color gel needed some Oklahoma yellow in it.
To string up chicken, I just used my rotisserie chicken spit fork that came with our air fryer! Then I took wire to attach it to a rod that laid over my super awesome tri-fold structure (the Propanels).
When you shoot very specific food photos, it’s easier to photograph and place every individual component to the shot gradually until it builds up to the final shot.
I used foam pouches, that had thick craft foam inside. It was a perfect depth to stick in teriyaki sticks of vegetables.
Some things to note about this shoot:
- always have your food styling kit next to you, within arm’s reach
- Scissors are your friend. Trim off chicken hairs that you find are illuminated by your lights. Or pull with tweezers maybe but for some reason that grosses me out.
- Parsley is always wild. Tame that parsley. Use plenty of wire or fishing string. (Parsley never likes to stay put in the air, it likes to be a wild child.)
- Get double or triple quantity of ingredients than you’ll actually need in the image. If your photo calls for two garlics, get a 4-6 garlics to examine or change out in the shot. Or if you only are using one shallot, get a bunch so that you have options to choose from in case one of them looks wonky. Plus, shallots are delicious anyway, I could live with excess shallots or garlic in my life.
