Cooking For The Camera - PART 2

In PART 1 I said a few things about the eye and how it becomes the ultimate reference point. Well a lot of things are true at the same time and if you look a little deeper it's still all about the taste buds. The goal of any food-shoot is to produce images that make people drool!

Advertising is all about creating an effect. In the case of most commercial food photography the Cadillac of effects is...an activation of the taste buds. If your pictures do that, you win - plain and simple. "Cooking for the camera" lands a little better than "eating with the eye," but six in one half dozen in the other.

The eye and the mouth both have a built-in framework. When that framework is mimicked by something external, it is very easily received. The eye is hard-wired to receive things like depth-of-field, movement and balance. And the mouth is hard-wired to receive things like salt, fat and acid. Of course it matters what you are photographing, but on some level it really doesn't. If the image mimics the hard-wiring, it will set off a physical reflex. Same goes for the mouth. Whether you eat fast food or not, swarms of people do. Because its fast and you don't even have to get out of your car if you don't want to, which is pretty damn awesome if you think about it. And because it hits the mouth's hard-wiring like cocaine!