Photographing food – What’s camera angle is best?

The best camera angle

For me, there is usually one best angle to shoot food from.  If you are given a choice, and there are no layout restrictions for a particular food photography project, you should shoot from a very low angle.  You don’t want to set up the camera from so low an angle that the bottom of the food is obscured by the lip of the plate, but neither do I want to go much higher than that.  Why so low of an angle?  It’s simple…  At a low angle, the food appears to have a lot of height or volume.  Shot from a low angle, even flat food like pancakes appear to have more substance.  The lower you shoot from the more this tends to be true and the higher you shoot from the less this tends to be true.

Food Photography from too low an angle

I mentioned that you shouldn’t shoot from so low that the bottom of the food is obscured by the lip of the plate, and most of the time that’s true, but not always.  If there is a sauce or gravy that hides behind the lip of that plate, that’s seldom objectionable, but usually, clients don’t like it too much when you clip the main food item.  This isn’t a hard and fast rule, just a food photography rule-of-thumb.

When I was looking through my portfolio for images to illustrate a few of the points in this article, I actually had a hard time because so many of my portfolio pictures are shot from very similar angles.  I don’t think that this shows that I'm in some type of rut, but rather that there is one best place from which to photograph food.  Yes, there are exceptions, and yes different foods my require the food photographer to shoot from a different angle, but for the most part, there is one best angle, at least in my opinion...  This makes for a good "starting point", but please don’t let this be the only angle you ever try.  It's a rule of thumb, and you know what they say about rules...  They're meant to be broken.

If you don’t have to deal with the lip of the plate, you can go even lower than “normal”, and there’s a few reasons that make this option attractive some times…  For example, this bagel sandwich has most of the really interesting stuff (the ingredients) in the middle of the object. Shooting from a very low angle only makes this a more interesting photo, with one exception.  If you go too low, you loose the hole of the bagel, which from the client’s perspective, was the whole idea…  Get-it…  Hole / whole… :o) So, you can't go too low or you loose the hole in the lid, but the lower you go, the more dramatic the picture. You also get a chance to include a little more enviroment too.

While you have to admit, there are times when shooting straight down makes for a pretty picture, but this only seems to work if the food being photographed is very graphic.  Rarely does it work with prepared foods that consist of more random shapes and you can never tell just how high the food object really is. 

Thee are foods that require a higher angle…  Soup, if not shot from a relatively high angle, ends up being more about the bowl and less about the food.

You can see from these to images what a difference a slight camera angle change can make in food photography.  I think both are pretty pictures, but one is more about the box and the other is more about the food. 

Both images have their place, but if you’re selling berries, you’d probably like the higher angle for this shot.  If you’re selling the boxes the berries come in, then you’d probably like the lower angle’s photo.

Here’s a good example of why food looks better shot from a lower angle.  This shot doesn’t show how tall the steak is.  It maybe paper-thin and you wouldn’t know until the thing showed up at your table.

This isn’t my favorite photo ever and it really suffers from the crop I gave it here to fit into the format of this page, but I think it illustrates pretty well how much more information is gives the viewer.