Rigatoni Express

Shooting better food photos with your phone

What tf is going on y’all? Matt here and this week, by popular demand, I’m gonna walk you step-by-step through taking a food photo using only your smartphone. 

Normally, when we have to shoot a recipe-particularly if it’s going to be printed somewhere- I use my trusty SLR, flash kit, a shitload of props, and I’ll spend hours editing it. But that’s all just polish. Today we’re stripping it down to the studs so that y’all can play along at home. I’m using natural light, a phone, and minimal props so that YOU feel more at ease shooting food.

yall are all gonna be food photographers when I’m done w/ you

Remember a few weeks ago Michelle shared a recipe for Winter Rigatoni? I’ll use this dish as our example.

First you wanna shoot somewhere that has solid natural light. I’m using the garage/podcast studio at Bad Manners’ HQ since the sliding garage door not only gives me a flood of sunlight but I can control the light by sliding the door. Any spot near a window or open door will work for y’all. 

the Forked Up podcast studio is far less glam than it looks on YouTube

It’s good practice to look up stock images of whatever dish you’re attempting to shoot- in our case 🤌 rigatoni🤌. Stock research can serve as inspo or more often, it’ll give you ideas of how NOT to shoot since there’s plenty of bad food photography out there. So given that glance at Google, it looks like overhead or three-quarter will be the best angle. I’m gonna choose overhead since this is the easiest for viewers to imagine themselves with the plate in front of them. Works every time. 

Next I’m gonna grab a couple of props. We have an entire room at our office full of just about any kind of kitchen prop you can imagine. It’s a collection slowly built over years of flea market finds, garage sales, and dumpster diving BUT for most of our food careers we didn’t have anything. Work with whatever you have in your kitchen but I promise, you don’t need a bunch of fancy shit. You can shoot almost anything with a white plate, white bowl, basic silverware, and some kinda fabric/napkin. Using those kitchen basics and my wood coffee table is how we originally started our blog back in 2012. Happy 10 Years to us or whatever.

Our prop room is a goddamn mess but trust me, I know EXACTLY where everything belongs

I pulled a few candidates for the shot. White plateware works with just about any dish but for this shot, I’m partial to the blue plates to give a splash of color to the food.  

Glasses are an easy prop especially when the light passes thru them like this. Really creates a vibe, just use a clear liquid.

After I grab props, I’m gonna look at surfaces. If you’ve been with us from the beginning you’ve seen all our earliest recipes were all shot on the same pine wood surface, my old coffee table, before we started using different backgrounds and surfaces. We don’t own a warehouse of tables, just lots of little pieces of fake tables. Some surfaces we’ve built and some we’ve bought but about half of our surfaces are just beat up furniture someone abandoned in an alley. I’ll use a sawzall to cut legs off and furniture oil to clean up the surface, one man’s treasure and all that.

Again, using surfaces and props is a cheat code we have BUT another reminder for years I shot literally everything on my coffee table using the same plateware I bought as a college freshman. Unless you do this professionally, none of this is necessary.

this is a wood surface I shoot on regularly, we have maybe 40 diff surfaces we use depending on the vibe we’re aiming for

And now a simple test shot to see if how the light and colors are coming along.

Faux surface, plates, silverware, fabric, and glass. So far, so good. 

The lighting right now is absolutely BUSTIN but I know the sun is gonna move on me, so let’s see what the fuck is holding up the food. Everytime we shoot, Michelle and I assume identities as “kitchen” and “camera”, respectively. One of us is usually waiting on the other but today since I have a super simple setup, the camera is waiting on the kitchen. 🗣️🗣️🗣️ WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING SO LONG!?

Michelle’s mise en place, the benefits of cooking this way cannot be overstated, especially for beginners.

you can see how much the light has moved by the shadow of the glass in the test shot vs final photo

After a few adjustments using the basic editing software on my iPhone (which is 5 years old). This is the final image. I notice some quality loss in the corners that I wouldn’t get if I had shot this on an SLR but for a cell phone photo, not bad!

Now it’s YOUR TURN to try. Tag us @badmannersfood in whatever you shoot or you can DM us if the public isn’t ready for your art yet. It doesn’t even hafta be something you cooked, you can cheat and use delivery, we won’t tell. Just focus on the light and styling of the shot. AND IF YOU DO wanna cook, the Winter Rigatoni as well as countless other recipes are available on our website BADMANNERS.COM and in our paid-supporters only newsletter every Sunday.

In tomorrow’s supporters only newsletter I’ll have some more advanced tips on using a flash and controlling light.

We can’t stop making pizza

As a thank you, we’ve team up with Ooni to raffle off one of their INSANE pizza ovens and a collections of our books. If you’re into pizza and fucking fabulous crust, you’re gonna wanna enter. We’re in love with ours.

We appreciate y’all spending your Saturday with us, now go shoot some mfkn food.

Matt and Michelle