The finished photograph might look beautifully simple. A perfect plate. Lovely light. A fork in exactly the right place. Perhaps a yolk doing something particularly glorious. What you don’t see is everything that happened before it.
Food shoots take an extraordinary amount of planning. There are recipes to agree. Then disagree about. Then agree again. Ingredients to source. Not just any tomatoes, but the right tomatoes. The best bread. The most beautiful herbs. The eggs with exactly the right shell colour. The plate that looked perfect in the reference image but somehow completely wrong when the food arrived.
There are conversations about whether something needs more height, less sauce, a different garnish, another spoon, no spoon at all. And occasionally quite passionate discussions about whether the final recipe is actually the final recipe. All before the camera has taken a single frame.
Then there are the people. Creative directors. Photographers. Food stylists. Home economists. Assistants. Clients. Chefs. Producers. Someone keeping an eye on timings. Someone finding a missing ingredient. Someone washing up the same pan for the eighth time. Everybody has their part to play.
A good food shoot works because all those different skills come together around one table. The photographer sees the light. The stylist knows that the leaf needs moving two centimetres to the left. The cook knows exactly how long something can sit before it stops looking delicious. The client knows the product.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, somebody asks the very important question:
Has anyone got any chocolate?
Because around 3pm, no amount of creative enthusiasm can compete with a room full of people whose blood sugar has disappeared. Chocolate helps. A lot. But that is also part of what we love about shoots.
They are busy. Occasionally chaotic. Full of tiny decisions. They involve far more people, conversations and cups of tea than the final photograph will ever reveal. And when the team is right, something rather magical happens. Everyone starts anticipating each other.
The food stylist is already fixing something the photographer has spotted. The photographer knows when the chef needs another minute. Someone quietly finds the missing prop. Somebody else appears with coffee.
Nobody is precious about whose idea it was. You’re simply trying to make the best thing you can together. Then, after hours of preparation, discussion, chopping, cooking, styling, tweaking and moving things half an inch…
Click. There it is. The image everyone had in their heads. And suddenly all that effort looks completely effortless. Which, of course, is rather the point.