These are really great photos for real food pictures – perfect food porn for Instagram! LOL

If you’re going to build a professional portfolio with food shots, permit me to share the secret to all those mouth-watering pictures by the big corporate pros, as someone whose done professional food photography for menu and full-color magazine design: The food is NOT table ready fare. Much of it is artfully created props; when real food is used, it’s not usually fully cooked and is painted, stained, or otherwise treated to “look” its mouth-watering best. This little bit of fakery also helps with lighting, because the colors and the surfaces tend to photograph better than the real thing.

For example, those fabulous looking pictures of the perfectly roasted turkey are of a bird cooked just enough to begin expanding and stretch that skin out, then it’s removed from the oven, heavily stained with sauce, then spray-shellacked for that perfect sheen. Any real food used in a corporate-style shoot is rendered inedible for the sake of art.

Another example is milk. When you see milk in those commercials and magazine ads, it is never really milk. The reason is that real milk will look washed out and not very much like milk in the photographic lighting or with a flash. We used Elmer’s glue.