If you are reading this post, that’s because you are probably a new food blogger trying to find out how to take food pictures like a pro with a smartphone. This is the right place to be for you because I will give you very simple instructions for beginners – you will know how to DIY your lightning for free! and edit photos on your smartphone to make them look amazing – also for free 🙂
When you are just starting a recipe blog, you most probably don’t have the skills and the equipment for professional photos. So many would choose to start their journey by looking for some high-quality free photos to use in their content.
The other way is to DIY your photos and try to your best to make them look professional. Cameras, lightninging, photo editing software – everything is so expensive, and more importantly, even if you have enough money to buy it all, it’s so overwhelming to learn how to use them and choose the best options. It can take months of research and analysis before you come up with a clear understanding of which photography equipment you can afford and which is the best in your price range.
Gosh, I feel sick just thinking about all the trouble you have to go through as a new food blogger – just to post nice pictures of your recipes! No wonder some of you guys follow my easy Start a blog instructions and then get stuck at the content creation step.
Anyone can use a free photo editor on a desktop. But have you ever thought if it’s possible to take beautiful and professional photos with your own smartphone? Well, it is possible! 🙂 This tutorial will guide you on how to make your photos look wonderful using just your smartphone.
This is the final result you will be able to achieve:
Starting with the basics, usually, what most people do, it’s to just snap a quick picture of the finished dish you just made, right? 🙂 Well, in most cases the light is quite poor indoors, and you have a lot of things around making noise in the final picture.
Here is another very useful post for you:
How to Make Pinterest Images That Drive Repins and Traffic
Contents
How To Setup Your Scenes for Food Pictures
As you can see in the image below, on the left side, if you take a photo right from your kitchen counter, with poor light and with a lot of elements creating noise in the background, your audience won’t be able to know where exactly to focus their attention.
On the other hand, on the right side, you can see clearly the focus of the picture – the strawberries. Here we have an almost white background with just the beautiful red color popping up. Also, notice the angle on the photo, this makes the strawberries look much better.
Important remark here: dark images receive 20 times fewer repins than images with medium lightness. Don’t use too dark photos. Also, images with red, pink tones get on average twice more repins!
Making Your Own “Studio”
We want our light to be diffused. What does this mean? It means that the light is not hitting directly into the scene. For example, sunlight or any artificial light pointing into it.
This is a photo of the studio I created in of the rooms in my house. I simply put a nice desk (you can even get like this from Amazon) next to a window where you don’t have direct sunlight.
Next, we will use a DIY reflector. To do this, just use some cardboard that you have from a box, cut it to a size of about 8 in x 8 inches.
Then, get some Aluminum paper and wrap around it and secure it with some tape.
Final piece:
Here, you can see an example of the Studio elements position:
When you are going to snap a picture, just hold the reflector like shown in this photo:
The image below shows the difference between having a reflector and without it. As you can see, all of those almost black shadows went away, and now the strawberries are more evenly lit.
The next step is to use a Free App called Snapseed.
Next, we are going to make just a 10-second quick edit to our photo that will make it look even better! Watch how in this video:
HOW I USE PINTEREST FOR MY OWN ONLINE BUSINESS AND MY RESULTS
My site is just a little over 1 year old, I started with a 0 following Pinterest account and by the 10thmonth blogging, I reached 172,000 monthly pageviews to my blog, with about 90% of traffic coming from Pinterest.
I started my second blog in Feb 2018, and the new blog momshealth.co already hit 74,000 monthly pageviews in less than 90 days! And again, almost all the traffic comes from Pinterest.
If you are interested in growing your Pinterest traffic fast, you can get yourself set up for success with my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. It’s over 6 hours of video training packed with my personal know-hows and Pinterest hacks.
I can guarantee that at least 50% of the Pinterest tips and tricks I share with you in the course, are absolutely exclusive and you will not find them in any other Pinterest course.
If you don’t need to grow fast and don’t mind working at your 9-5 job for a lot longer, you can totally keep reading my emails and posts because I also share tons of free advice. It’s just a matter of how FAST you want to grow your blog and income.
How to take food pictures like a pro with a smartphone
Instructions
- How To Setup Your Scenes for Food Pictures
- Making Your Own "Studio"
