Yummy food photos

Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my friends who is an excellent cook and tries to come up with a food blog but she finds it difficult to make yummy photos of yummy food. I have to agree on that as I find taking food photographs very challenging myself. Coming back to my recent trip to London and the cookbooks I bought - deliciously looking food in tasteful pictures was the reason of my urge to buy them. One of the books was "Eating Together" from the Australian Women's Weekly (take a look yourself):

Eggs Benedict from Eating Together Photographer: Stuart Scott. Stylist: Kate Brown.

 and another buy of mine was Gwyneth Paltrow's "Notes from my Kitchen Table"

So what does it take to make a yummy photo of a yummy (or not) food? Thinking of that I remembered a story one of my professors told during my studies at the university. We were talking about the image and the perception of image when the professor told us that famous film director Alfred Hitchcock who was also famous for his sense of humour once threw a "blue dinner party" for his Hollywood friends. He asked his chef to prepare all the foods blue:  blue mashed potatoes, blue peas, blue meat and blue martinis. He was fascinated with human psychology and because of the fact that blue is not a natural colour for food he wanted to see if it would turn people off. And so it did. Many of his guests became queasy and some couldn’t even eat. So if we saw a pink lemon we would hardly choose it among the yellow ones I suppose. 

Today I took a risk and tried to take a photo of the food I prepared for dinner and it turned out quite well even being on a blue plate :) I believe it is all about the light, angle, close-ups, details (not having too many), composition, reflecting the structure of the food, and preferably having a rather good camera. And passion for either one - food or photography would be an advantage. Of course realising that blue pasta, chicken, mushrooms or zucchinis would definitely make a difference :) Which means people likely choose what they recognise. Isn't that one of the golden rules of marketing? :P