Food photographers are good at guarding the secrets of their trade, but the normally academic photography blog Photocritic is spilling the beans on a variety of different photo-food tricks.
The article notes that for most assignments -- including all advertisements -- real food must be used. So if you're shooting a hamburger for McDonald's, it must be the same patty that a McDonald's store would use. Beyond that, things get murky.
For instance, your local McDonald's doesn't use a blowtorch on the edges of the
patty to get it the right color of brown. Neither does it add
shoe polish to the top and edges of the patty to make it glisten like
it just came out of the oven.
The hamburger bun gets its own
special treatment: "[Photographers] have been known to glue
sesame seeds in too-bare spaces." Of course, the bun cannot touch the
patty, so cardboard lifts are used to separate and elevate
the lettuce from the hamburger and the bun from the lettuce.
Mashed
potatoes also play an important role, even when the meal
doesn't call for them. Potatoes are used to plump up a chicken by
injecting them underneath the skin; they're also used in pies. Unlike
normal pie fillings, mashed potatoes don't deflate. When a slice of the pie is cut out, it's easy to attach
lemon or cherry jelly to the sticky potatoes and voilà -- a
beautiful piece of pie. Mashed potatoes moistened with glycerin make up the scoop of ice cream on top of the
pie.
And with ice cream you need chocolate syrup. One of the
loopholes: The only food that must be real is the one being advertised. So the chocolate syrup, which looks "unphotogenic," is
replaced with motor oil. To keep the motor oil from soaking into the
ice cream or other foods, spray deodorant comes to the rescue.
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