The interesting challenge of shooting real food (lots of pics)

I've just spend close to 8 hours today retouching a food shoot I had shot in the week. It was an interesting challenge, more so than I imagined to be honest.

I've done food shoots before, and its always been a restaurant or catering company wanting to showcase their food as well as possible (regardless of authenticity). They often get in highly regarded chef's to cook the dishes who wouldn't typically work for them. It's not uncommon that many dishes aren't even cooked, and certainly not edible, as they're often just made to look as nice as possible visually. This might involve the heavy use of oils, dyes, paints etc to make the food look amazing. This is all pretty common practice with food photography.

However for the shoot I did during the week (for a new cafe in Dublin), the management were adamant we should be photographing their actual food. They also wanted it shot in their premises so customers could really get a feel for what they'd actually be getting. Obviously we used some nice lights and lenses to help it along but they felt strongly that the food and images should be authentic. I actually found that to be refreshingly honest.

The issue was, it was a cafe. Admittedly a very nice cafe, but just the very nature of the food they serve meant a lot of it was fried, cooked in oil so some of it was slightly greasy, not overly so, but add lights and reflections in and it can prove a bit of a challenge. Even just the process of shooting, moving some of the food around on the plate etc meant that some of it was slightly more messy than the pristine food shoots I'd done previously.

The retouching involved a lot of subtle details that could only be done by slow manual editing but I'm really happy with the results so though't I'd share them here. Also worth mentioning I've been editing this while on a fairly strict diet, so working on these images has been tougher than normal.

Hope you like!!