Food Photography with Nokia Lumia #FoodiesOnTour

This is guest post by Jo Yee who covered this fab event for the blog when I was away travelling. 

These days with the popularity of mobile photography it’s no surprise that more and more people mistakenly refer to their mobile as their camera. I, myself, am an iPhone user but was intrigued by the opportunity to shoot with the Nokia Lumia
1020 at the #FoodiesOnTour event sponsored by Microsoft Devices Group. With 40 megapixel capability and fitted with Zeiss lens I think its safe to say the device is more camera than phone!

The food styling & photography masterclass was held at Leiths School of Food and Wine and taught by cookery teacher and food stylist, Jessica Mills. Each blogger was equipped with either a Nokia Lumia 1020 or its bigger brother, the Nokia Lumia 630 to capture the evening.

After an introduction and overview of the evening we were given a quick tutorial on how to use the camera phone with its manual settings then Jessica’s colleague, Jenny, demonstrated how to prepare a rack of lamb. My fellow bloggers and I were then put to work in cooking, styling and photographing our dinner assisted by Jessica.

On the menu was:

Starter: spinach and bacon salad with red chilli and mango

Main: rack of lamb coated with mustard & breadcrumbs and tomato mint salsa

Dessert: pavlovas with mint, papaya, pomegranate and passion fruit.

Broken into teams of 3, we divided and conquered our individual courses. From my team, Andrew (themotleyspicer.com) took on the unenviable task of preparing the rack of lamb (read: fat trimming and scraping away the membranes connected to each rib) while Tash (foodifancy.com) seduced us with the aroma of bacon for the salad and I went on unchartered territory in trying my hand with pavlovas.

Another team’s presentation

The recipes Jessica provided proved to be pretty reliable as we were all happy with the results. The lamb was a tad overcooked but tender and complemented by the texture of the mustard and breadcrumb crust. The bacon salad sung beautifully as I expected it to, after all it was dressed with bacon fat! The pavlovas, I’ll admit, were a little over worked but held their own, a sweet tang danced from bite to bite.
We eagerly tucked in after a round of styling & photographing, breaking bread with the rest of the bloggers. At the end of the evening, Jessica presented the Leiths Cookery Bible to the winner of the casual food styling competition… me!

Here are the final results from my team’s food styling attempts. And I’ll leave you with some handy food styling tips from Jessica:

Food Styling and Photography Tips

– Use less food than you normally would. Think about framing the dish with
the plate.

– Look for a complementary background and props.

– Think about textures.

– Food doesn’t have to be too placed; it can look slightly messy and random
within reason

– Choose crockery that will enhance rather than detract

– Think about work in progress shots i.e. ingredients or just before something
goes in the oven

– You may wish to photograph a dish whole or a bit or scoop taken out of it

– Think about how you’re going to shoot the dish i.e. overhead, at a slight angle,
or on the side

– Think about colours, textures, patterns of food and props.

– Think about the lighting of the dish. Consider how you want the finished dish
to look when you are prepping and assembling the ingredients.

– Think about height and make it interesting, although some dishes work quite
well being flat

– Think about garnishes and how you can make the dish look fresher by
reserving some ingredients to scatter just before taking the photo.

EatCookExplore was a guest of  Microsoft Devices