Food Photography by Andrew Scrivani

Remember the CreativeLive class on food photography I've been taking? (You can refresh your memory with these sandwich photos and this cake mix fudge.) Now that I've worked through all 39 videos, I can officially say that the class is outstanding and I highly recommend it! The class was full of helpful suggestions and things I could do immediately to improve my food photography. The pace was perfect and the lessons were interesting. Andrew Scrivani is an excellent teacher. 

I've been wanting to do another food photo shoot to see if I could put my new knowledge to use. Potato Chip Cookies were just the thing to photograph. The recipe is from the Idaho Little Passports State Journal. I'll be sharing all the Idaho-inspired activities Trevor and I did in a future post. 

Good food photographs start with good food styling. I stacked some cookies on a small white plate. I set a glass of milk and the cookies next to each other on a blue dish towel. The balance wasn't right, so I added some potato chips. I moved in low and close. Here's my first shot. Other than the watermarks, this and the rest of the photos in this post are straight out of my point-and-shoot camera.

There's plenty of room for improvement, but it is already 100 times better than how I used to photograph food. As a point of comparison, I found the first photo of cookies that appeared on my blog back in 2011:

(Pinwheel Cookie recipe)

And that is some of my better early photography. What a difference it would have made if I'd done even a small amount of styling.

I shot a few more photos of the cookies, potato chips and milk, playing with angles.

Then I took away the plate and did a close-up of just the cookies and the potato chips.

One of the things Andrew emphasized throughout the class was to try shooting a food in a variety of ways. I already had shots of the pristine cookies, so I experimented with photographing the cookies and milk as they went from untouched to gone.

I really like this shot.

You get a completely different perspective (literally) when shooting from above.

I couldn't be happier with Food Photography by Andrew Scrivani (affiliate link) and recommend it to any of you who would like to improve your food photography. The price of $129 may seem high at first, but consider the value of over 15 hours of video instruction that you can go through at your own pace. It's worth it. 

I recommend browsing through the hundreds of classes CreativeLive has to offer. There are many shorter, more affordable classes. And don't forget that you can watch any of their classes for free when they are live! You can't beat that.