Food Photography

Here's how to make that meal look as good as it tastes.

In the age of Instagram, everyone gets to be a food photographer. But let’s be honest: some of those photos in your feed are pretty unappetizing. I'm sure that meal was mouthwatering, but the bad lighting, off-angle, and brown soupy pasta sauce aren’t doing your Bolognese any favors.

Besides hauling a full-frame DSLR to dinner, snapping some quickie photos of memorable meals out with family and friends on your smartphone has always been a hit-or-miss affair... until now.

Thanks to Instagram and other social media platforms, food photography is probably bigger now than ever before.

In the lush, forested foothills of Mount Aso in the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, a small cadre of travelers will soon descend on the hot springs-rich town of Kurokawa. They will come in search of deeper meaning: They're after the Japanese concept of mono-no-aware, or “the pathos of things,” which centers on the awareness of life’s ephemeral nature. They're seeking the serene aesthetic of wabi sabi, a worldview grounded in the acceptance of transience and imperfection. And then, of course, they come to Instagram. 

If you check Instagram as much as we do (which might be more than we care to admit), curating the right feed is very important. Whether you're following Instagram influencers or bakers making lattices almost too impressive to eat (we said almost), it's important to choose accounts that make you happy, and hungry.

The March issue of Food & Wine celebrates food photography in all of its forms – from highlighting the 40 photographs and moments that changed the way we eat to featuring what we call “cooks and shooters”: photographers who cook and chefs who take photos.

We know Instagram is full of beautiful food photos—so many, in fact, there's even a trend of people ruining them. But this hilarious Instagram account is showing us how to do the exact opposite: make food photographs even better. So much better. How?

Some, like guest editor Eric Wolfinger and Deana Saukam, trained their lenses on far-off lands to contribute to this visual feast. Danish chef Bo Bech shared a vignette from Paris. Photographer Penny De Los Santos documented a Muslim community in eastern Michigan, while Romulo Yanes and Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton hunkered down in their kitchens. We include the recipes they discovered on their respective journeys.

We were on assignment on the Italian island of Chioggia at the southern end of the Venetian Lagoon. It was early spring—cool, wet, lovely. We had the morning free, so we took a walk. At the end of a narrow lane, we peeked over a stone wall and saw a man working in his kitchen garden. He spied us and, with a wave of his hand, invited us into his world. All was quiet in the bare plot, with its faint pattern of rows covered with rotting leaves. Once in, the gardener beckoned us to follow him to the end of a path.