Delicious Macro Food Photography

Delicious Macro Food Photography

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Delicious Macro Food Photography

When a group of girls meet up at a restaurant, there is no reason not to take some appetising shots first when delicate dishes and desserts are brought to the table. In addition to using the built-in filters in your camera to create food shots with a distinctive style, you can also get closer to your food and use a macro lens to capture one-of-a-kind photos that please the eyes and taste buds!

Super Macro Mode to Reveal the Details of Food

When dining in a crowded restaurant where space is limited, shooting the entire dish may end up including the messy environment in the composition. We can have a better result by capturing a feature food shot with a macro lens, which brings shallow depth of field for a blurry background and makes the subject itself more stand out. The compact EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM lens measures only 45.5mm in length and weighs only 130g, making it a perfect everyday lens for female users. Featuring a Super Macro Mode, this lens enables you to enlarge and emphasize the texture and subtle details of food for some amazing photo results, such as to capture the silky milk froth of coffee and cake decorations.
EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM offers a closest focus distance of 1.5cm1at Super Macro Mode and shake compensation of up to 3.5-stop shutter speed. Clear and sharp images can be achieved easily even when taking food shots at close range with a handheld camera.

1Distance from the front of lens to subject
You can turn the lens to Super Macro Mode simply by pressing the lock release button.
A shot of the entire plate of dessert. Composition is clean but a bit boring.
A shot taken at Macro Mode looks more exceptional. The small drupes that make up the raspberry are captured clearly, with a focus on the gold flakes on top.
EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM can achieve a 1.2x magnification at Super Macro Mode, which makes it perfect for capturing the fine cilia and surface texture of the raspberry.
A close-up shot of the coffee’s delicate milk froth is a good way to reproduce the silky smooth coffee experience. Pay special attention to the shutter speed when shooting, as even a slightest handshake can affect the image sharpness. Suggested shutter speed to use is 1/100s.

Use of Lighting to Create Tempting Colors

Mastering the use of lighting is a prerequisite to capturing mouth-watering food shots. When taking a feature shot of food, there are chances that the light to the subject is blocked by the lens because of the close distance between the two, resulting in unwanted shadow. Since we are in a restricted restaurant setting and we cannot ensure to get a table by the window for natural sunlight, EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM’s built-in Macro Lite can come in handy. You can adjust illumination manually for both left and right sides of the LED light to bring out the scrumptious glaze of food for a delicious result.
The color of the jam on the strawberry tart looks bright and appetising under ample lighting.
EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM is the world’s first autofocus lens with built-in Macro Lite2, allowing users to adjust illumination manually on both sides and single-side of left or right part to enusre total control of the lighting effect.

2Among interchangeable lenses for cameras (DSLR or mirrorless cameras) with autofocus function. As of May, 2016, based on Canon's research
The beautiful shape of the cream on the cup cake is further emphasized by providing fill-lighing with the use of single-side LED light (photo on right).

Accurate White Balance Setting to Reproduce Faithful Colors

The shooting distance determines the composition while the lighting determines the photo’s details. To capture delicious photos of food, white balance setting is another important factor. As we ususally take food shots in an indoor environment, the artificial lighting of the restaurant will affect largely on the photo’s white balance. We can imagine how a photo (and the appetite) is ruined when the golden deep-fried delicacies appear bluish in the photo. That is why we should always adjust the camera’s white balance setting according to the ambient lighting. For example, when shooting inside a room with soft yellow lighting, set the white balance to “Tungsten” to ensure faithful color reproduction.
The result when the white balance is set wrongly to “Flash” (photo on left). After correcting the white balance to “Fluorescent” (photo on right), the dessert looks scrumptious.
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