Improving Composition for Food Photography - Part 1

0:00 I'm not really sure why but I just haven't given a lot of time to this topic on this channel and so for that I wholeheartedly apologize but I promise I will make it up to [Music] you what's sh bacon I'm Joanie Simon welcome to my studio this is where I do food photography and this is the channel where I share what I know in hopes that your food photography Journey will be just a little bit easier and so today as I announced in the previous video we are kicking off the bite shot book club so we're going to be going through a series of books all together in hopes that we can really go back to basics the

0:46 foundations of Photography and apply that to food photography so that we can catapult our images to the next level this year and so our very first book which I'm so excited to dig into because this is a topic that is obviously so important for food photography is mastering composition the definitive guide for photographers by Richard Garvey Williams and this is one of my favorite books on composition um just because it does a really great job of laying out all of the basics the foundations and really giving us some tangible examples image wise uh in this book that we can refer to to really understand make these Concepts come alive but of course the problem is there's not really much food I've got an orangutang I've got a lot of Landscapes but there's not a lot of food so what

1:32 we're going to do is we're going to bring up some of my favorite topics from this book and I'm going to show you in terms of food photography how we apply these Concepts so one of the topics that's early on in this book that I think is so important to discuss that honestly I don't hear a lot of people talking about maybe I'm just not running in the right circles but it just seems that when it comes to composition we don't have enough discussion around the concept of visual weight that when we look at an image does it feel balanced or does it feel imbalanced now there's not a right or wrong in creating an image with balance or imbalance right and the idea that sometimes you want to create an image that makes people uncomfortable that kind of sets them off a little bit that doesn't feel completely whole and balanced then

2:19 that's a really effective tool but in general for food photography we're trying to create images that are aesthetically pleasing that are inviting people into that image uh that you can feel it home and you can feel comfortable and a sense of peace and so we do that by creating visual balance by making sure we've evenly distributed the visual weight now just to further explain the idea of balance is that if we took any given image and drew a line right down the center of it whether that is horizontal or vertical doesn't matter we draw a line from the top to the bottom and that the right side and the left side would feel balanced that there's an equilibrium there that there's as much weight visual weight on the right side as there is on the left side and it's not just a matter of

3:04 creating a perfectly symmetrical image which certainly feels balanced but if we want to have a bit more creativity how do we do that well we have to understand how the various elements that are in an image relate to one another in order to create that sense of balance so let's do like we always do and give you a visual example of what this looks like how we create images that feel balanced understanding the various elements that are in that so the very first thing to consider in terms of the actual elements that you have is their relative size to one another that visually a larger item is going to carry more visual weight than a smaller item right that makes sense so let's say for example and I'm going to sketch this out I always like to sketch things out before I get

3:50 actually to the setup so I know what I'm kind of working with I have the vision in my mind and I know we're going to play with eggs today because to me nothing is more Getting Back to Basics than eggs so we're going to do a vertical orientation let's go ahead and set it up like yay and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to place a sliced egg on the left side and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to place a very large plate on the right side and now we look at this image and it just feels really heavy on that right side right because that large plate carries a lot of visual weight it's kind of weighing down that right side so how do we counterbalance that well we can just add more visual weight to that left side so something to kind of counterbalance add some weight to the

4:35 image would be sort of a mediumsized bowl or coffee cup so now let's take this same setup and take it one step further with another point that Garvey Williams makes is that any elements that have interest will also appear heavier so something with more texture more pattern more color something that just has more visual interest will appear heavier than something that's more simple so say for example we swap this plain white plate and we swap it out now for a busier plate with some pattern and some color and texture on it and suddenly that's added a lot of visual weight again to that right side creating sort of an imbalance in this image so again something to consider in terms of how you're incorporating especially props that if you're using very

5:22 patterned or ey catching props that they do have a tendency to pull more weight toward them which can create some imbalance in your image that's not to say that you shouldn't use props that have a lot of interest to them I absolutely love that and that's something that I'm continually trying to work on and push myself toward because then what it does is it pushes you to then think creatively of how do I counteract that how do I balance that then on the other side if I've got a really busy you know teapot or cup or plate or something how do I balance that with something else that's equally busy and has interest then on the other side it's all about creating balance so now another interesting point that he makes that I've heard before but I would love some feedback from you all because this is a global audience and some of the

6:08 Nuance of the experience of this phenomenon can be different just culturally depending on which direction you read from like how we read a book right that for example I read from left to right that's how we read English right whereas there's other cultures that read from right to left and so based on that he's saying that you will give more visual weight to one side versus the other that if you are somebody who reads from left to right that you will have more visual weight placed on the right and that the left will feel a little lighter just because it's more in proximity to you from that starting point from where you start to read and that the opposite is true then for anybody who reads from right to left so let's just run a little test okay another sketch here I'm going to do a

6:55 horizontal orientation and then I'm going to get a larger plate and I'm going to stick those egg halves there on uh the plate and then I'm thinking I'll put a bowl down and just kind of peeking in the lower half down here filled with some uncooked unshell or at least unshelled eggs and then I'm thinking we'll have just the coffee kind of poking in kind of little poking in from the side right this is me and my breakfast morning ritual of hard boiling the eggs coffee non-negotiable right okay so that is the setup now if we took that that image and instead we flipped it right that we've got a lot more visual weight because the size of that plate and the interest on the eggs it's putting a lot of visual interest on that one side that if we flip that would that

7:42 feel more imbalanced I don't know it feels unbalanced to me but some of that might be again just culturally I read from left to right so I'd be curious anybody out there who reads from right to left does it feel more balanced if the weight is on the right side you let me know but now another point he makes and if we take this same image is that elements at the top of the frame feel heavier than elements at the bottom of the frame and this makes sense just in terms of our own personal interpretation of gravity right the idea of something's up at the top whether even if that's a flatlay or a straight on 3/4 whatever anything that's at the top theoretically we're thinking is going to fall by the effects of gravity so if we take this same exact scene but now if we move those eggs then that were at the bottom

8:27 and we move them from the top does that create an even greater sense of balance again understanding that we've got a really large subject on the left side with a lot of interest in comparison to everything else in the image that if we move that up to the top it carries a lot more visual weight or maybe it is now created sort of you know some Discord and it's not quite as much of an equilibrium and so we can counterbalance that then by poking in maybe an additional coffee cup or some other little item then out there on the left side to create again sense of Harmony a sense of balance and then finally another point that I think is so valuable to keep in the back of our minds as we're setting up scenes and considering the elements in our image is that negative space is an element in and

9:13 of itself that any open areas in your image are interpreted as their own element right you think oh it's just open space there's no elements there actually that negative space is its own element so depending on how you have arranged your items that you may have a lot going on just in terms of smaller things on the left side so you counterbalance that then with a lot of open space on the right side as an equal distribution to create that sense of balance and to create that sense of Harmony and so it's books like this that I love because we're not fixated on the rule of thirds that it's not as much about specific placement as much as it is understanding the relationship between the various elements that you have in the scene and how they create a

9:59 sense of balance and Harmony between them so hopefully that was helpful hopefully you got some new ideas firing certainly if you put any of these things into practice and you post them up over on Instagram feel free to tag me I am atthe bitot and feel free to use our hashtag bite shot book club I can go through there and give you a little thumbs up and love it and all the things so thank you so much for joining me and I will be back here again next week we'll be delving even further into this book and the idea of composition some of the other great little nuggets from this book certainly if you want to check out the other books that are in the book club series I've got those all linked down below but with that you stay out of trouble and I'll see you soon okay bye

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