Please welcome today’s guest post about some simple holiday food photography tips from Olympus Visionary and former New York Times food photographer Lou Manna !

How to Snap Pictures of Your Holiday Food that Look Good Enough to Eat

1. Keep your composure. Think of a table centerpiece.  It’s there as a main point of interest at the table.  The same is true for food photography.  Find a main point of interest—your photo’s centerpiece—and compose your photograph to draw the viewer’s eye to it.  You can do this by sticking to the “Rule of Thirds”: Divide the photograph’s frame into a Tic-Tac-Toe design and place your subject at one of the intersecting points.

2. A fork’s-eye view. Lower and raise the camera to obtain unique perspectives.  Place your camera on the table and photograph your plate from the point of view of your utensils.  Photographing your meal from a low angle can bring volume and scale to your food, while allowing you access to a picture you would not be able to capture with your own eyes—unless you really crouched and strained at the table!

3. Limit your ingredients.  This sounds like a no-brainer, but often food photographs look cluttered and jumbled.  Don’t try to shove your entire table into a picture.  Rather than one picture trying to capture everything at once, take ten pictures of your holiday table and scene—snap close ups of the plates, decorations, main dishes—and then create a storyboard or holiday photo gallery.  Taking pictures at different times during the meal will showcase half-eaten meals and half-full serving dishes, incorporating a sense of timeline and narrative into your holiday celebration.

4. Give your food a sense of style. Food that’s fresh tastes best—and photographs best. Be prepared to shoot your food right out of the oven or off the stove so it looks organically, effortlessly fresh and moist.  Lightly brush the food with vegetable oil to add shine and highlights.  A little oil never hurt the taste of a dish, either!

5.     Clean your plate. Manipulate food with tweezers, if you’re looking to artfully position and style a dish before you photograph it.  Clean up crumbs and food particles on plates with Q-tips and paper towels.

6.     Crack the ISO code. ISO denotes how sensitive your camera’s image sensor is to the amount of light available for the picture. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive the image sensor and better equipped your camera is to take pictures in low-light situations (think: romantic dinners!).  Even if the lights aren’t dimmed, shooting indoors without a flash is still darker than you may realize.  When shooting cookie trays, pumpkin pies and table settings indoors without a flash, the ISO setting should be set to 800 or 1600 so that the camera sensor is more sensitive to the ambient, inside light and captures details, texture and shine.

7.     White Balance—Or Whipped Cream Balance. Anything but stark white whipped cream is less than pixel worthy. Don’t spoil your holiday food photographs by not knowing how to set your white balance. The auto white balance setting in your camera normally does a good job for most lighting situations. If you’re shooting indoors with household lamps (under incandescent or tungsten lighting), use your camera’s preset for tungsten white balance. If the lighting is fluorescent (hello, office holiday party!), then the fluorescent white balance setting will work better. A good trick is to take a custom white balance reading off of a white or grey card for a more accurate color rendition in your photo—and then adjust accordingly.

8.     Setting the Scene [Modes]: Many cameras have Scene Modes that automatically adjust the camera’s settings for you (like ISO and white balance).  Try Cuisine Mode, Indoor Mode, and Candlelight Mode to explore different effects and presets that are perfect for meal time.

9.     Slow and steady wins the race:  A tripod helps to avoid camera shake under low light conditions and with slow shutter speeds (below 1/60). To further reduce camera shake, set your camera to take the picture a few seconds after pressing the shutter release button. This will reduce the movement your hand might cause when taking the picture. With a DSLR, try the mirror-lock up feature to further reduce camera shake.

10.  Macro—and cheese: To shoot food close up, use the macro setting on a point and shoot camera, which is typically indicated with a flower icon. Use a macro or a close focusing lens on a camera with interchangeable lenses to get closer to your subject.  You can use Macro to photograph the smiling faces of your guests around the table, too, right up close.

11.  Another stage for your shower curtain: Use household items such as aluminum foil, makeup mirrors and white napkins to reflect the light source into the shadow areas of the photo and capture more detail. To soften the light source, try diffusing it with wax paper or a sheer white cloth to achieve more details in the bright portions of the photo.

12.  Don’t flash your party guests!: Try to avoid using your camera’s built-in flash since this direct light flattens the subject and reduces texture and depth of faces and food. It is better to use the available light from lamps and lighting fixtures in the room or natural daylight from a window.

13.  Creativity doesn’t stop when the oven turns off: Experiment with colors and moods by using the in-camera creative filters found in newer cameras, like the Olympus E-PL1.  Your holiday shot could look even more festive and colorful by using the Pop Art filter. The saturated color reproduction will enhance your beautiful food and setting. Try the Soft Focus filter to capture the mood of a romantic dinner.  Grainy Black and White film makes any photograph feel like a classic.

14.  Happy shooting—and eating!