So you’ve saved up money to buy a great camera and now you’re spending your days on YouTube learning how that works and/or you’ve enrolled in one or several courses in order to speed up your learning of the gear. You now (weeks, months or years since you bought it) hopefully master your camera and you expect great results, yet your images are not meeting your expectations. You are understandably very frustrated because you thought buying the amazing camera and mastering it was all you needed to create great food photography and you now understand that’s not enough. Something is missing.
What’s missing?
Something much more important than your camera is missing: knowing how to light your food subjects.
Let me back up for a second
The are four fundamental pillars in photography, no matter what the photography genre is and no matter what your skills are: Lighting, Composition, Editing and Camera.
Lighting is BY FAR, the most important one of them and, if you’re just starting out, the camera you’re using is the least important one. If lighting is not great, it doesn’t matter how great your composition is, it doesn’t matter how good you are with editing and it doesn’t matter how incredible your camera is.
And that is the problem you’re facing right now. You started from the wrong end, you neglected the other three pillars of photography (Lighting, Composition and Editing) and they simply don’t match your amazing camera gear. It’s like buying the most incredible pots and pans when you don’t really know how to cook and expecting the most incredible meal.
Don’t get me wrong
By all means, go for the $5k camera system without knowing anything about food photography, just make sure you can manage your expectations and are aware that your great camera system alone is never going to guarantee great food images. Your camera system will eventually start to make a difference and have an impact on the quality of your food photography, but that will start to happen only AFTER you’ve become good with Lighting, Composition and Editing.
Especially if you are just starting out, you have a pretty long way to go before your camera system becomes the limiting factor in your photography. In other words, you could direct your efforts (financial and otherwise) towards learning the most important thing first: lighting!
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May the right light be with you! ☀️📷😀