Shoot food photographs that sell the product without accompanying text descriptions.

The way to a person's stomach is through their eyes, which is why there is so much demand nowadays for mouth-watering food photography among food establishments and food products. Whether you shoot food for a living or for your Mom and Pop chop-and-chew shop, you will benefit from this workshop, where renowned food photographer Mark Floro cooks up a generous serving of professional techniques and trade secrets for making pictures look good enough to eat. Even the finest cuisine is like a beautiful model: it, too, must be made up, prepped, and lit properly to look good in a photo.

What will be covered

• Equipment needed, from camera and lenses, lights, to inexpensive widgets
• Start with the ingredients: Why food photography is only as good as the food stylist
• Go from rare: Different styles of photographing food
• To medium: Sculpting food with light, and bringing out color and texture
• To well done: professional tricks for making food positively appetizing and irresistible
• How to light drinks
• Problems, solutions, and workarounds
• The business side of food photography

Who should attend

• Commercial photographers doing work for advertising and food packaging
• In-house staff of food establishments in charge of preparing displays, menus, and sales materials
• Photographers planning to specialize in food photography
• Amateur photographers who want to broaden their skill set

Prerequisites

• Participants should have attended the PCCI Basic Photography workshop, or have equivalent experience in photography
• Digital camera with manual exposure control, and preferably but not necessarily with a PC socket for external flash
• Lens that can fill the frame with a single entrée on a regular-sized plate
• Tripod
• Laptop with a program for viewing and selecting uploaded images (the camera's included application will be sufficient). Please advise the front office if you cannot bring a laptop.

Instructor

You yourself must have fallen under the spell of Mark Floro's magic somewhere, at some time: when you were drawn into a restaurant or picked up a food product displaying a photograph Mark took. He has photographed for the menus, outdoor and counter displays, print ads, posters, and packaging of Chow King, Pizza Hut, Tokyo Tokyo, Nestle, Magnolia, Fruits & Ice Cream, San Miguel, Purefoods, Selecta, Universal Robina, Unilever, and of course his wife's Italian specialty restaurant, Buon Giorno! [Read Mark's bio]