Food Photography

So I do, nearly every night, photograph my dinner. Sometimes I don't put up the pictures if they're redundant, or if I don't have enough time to blog that evening.

But something happened today that puzzled me:



The above two pics are Thursday and Friday's dinners; yes, I ate cereal and toast for dinner on Thursday night, and the bottom one is potato-cabbage-Jerusalem artichoke soup (you can see a samosa peeking out from the top right corner).

Always when I photograph my dinners I have to photoshop them afterwards because the resolution on my camera is so poor. The above two pictures have both been run through the "sharpen" and "contrast" filters and even still they look blurry--particularly that potato soup pic.

Then this morning I took this picture, straight off, with no photoshopping:

How'd I manage that one???? You can actually see the reflection on the bowl and the individual grains of Kashi and even the wrinkles in the raisins! This looks like a breakfast someone might actually want to eat.

I suppose it has something to do with the whole "a good photographer takes 100 pictures and uses 1," but I don't have time to photograph every meal 100 times. Maybe the lighting is better in the morning or something, or maybe the side angle works better than the top-down one.

But that last picture seems to make clear that it isn't actually the resolution on my camera that's off: it's the photographer herself! Hmmm...