Shoot iPhone Food Photography Like A Pro

Hey, what's up everyone? How's it going? Today, we're gonna be shooting some food, but we're not gonna be using our big old DSLRs. No, no, no. Today, I'm gonna show you how to shoot some amazing food photography using your iPhone. This video is being sponsored by the great people over at the wonderful online learning community, Skillshare. But more on that in just a bit. All right, so using your smartphone to take pictures of those tasty recipes you're cooking up is really not much different than your giant DSLR. The only niceties that you get with the bigger cameras are things like resolution, critical focus, depth of field, lens selection, things like that that come with the more expensive cameras. But the lighting, the composition, the styling, the editing, those things remain the same no matter what kind of camera you're using. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how to get the most out of your smartphone, how to get hands-free with it, whether you're shooting from in front of the food or above the table, that way you're not fidgeting around with your composition. I'm also gonna show you how to use Lightroom Mobile as a camera app and as an editing app because Lightroom Mobile is a great camera app as well. It has a ton of really cool features for customizing your exposure. And then you can turn around and edit those photos just as quick and easily as you could in Lightroom on your computer, using the sliders, using presets, and all that really cool, fun stuff. And then you can get those photos out onto the web quickly, onto Instagram and all that stuff. So let's grab the camera that's always with us and get to shooting. I think for most people who are shooting with their smartphones for food photography are probably gonna look to work with some natural light. So I hunted around my house and I found that the sliding glass door in my bedroom had some beautiful natural light streaming through it. I'm gonna use this large oval diffuser to modify some of this direct natural light just cramming in the window there. This is gonna give me some beautiful, soft highlights and shadows on my table. Personally, I like to scooch my table right up against the window, right up against the diffuser. That way I can get the best available light. But for this tutorial, I need to leave a little bit of space so I can place a light stand here and give you guys an overhead camera angle of what I'm doing. But now that I got my tabletop set up, just place my surface on the tabletop and I'm ready to set up the camera. I had to jump back here into the studio because it was getting a little bright out there with all that natural light. And I wanted to show you all the cool features that the Lightroom app has for taking photos. All right, so inside the app, you have your catalog of images and down here at the bottom, you have this little blue camera icon. At first glance, it doesn't really look much different but press on this menu over here where it says auto and then I'll switch it to professional mode. Now I get a bunch more control over the camera. I can change my white balance to tungsten, fluorescent, daylight, cloudy, or a custom setting. I think I'll stick with my daylight for my natural light environment. But later, I'm gonna jump in here with the phone and start shooting with my tungsten lights inside the studio. Then over here, I can control the ISO with this slider from 25 all the way up to 1600. And the same with the shutter speed. With this slider, I can move it up and down to really nail that exposure. Now up here with these three little dots, I get my favorite features. One is I can change the aspect ratio of the frame by four by three or 16 by nine or one to one in case you wanna check what parts of your images you're cropping off for video or Instagram. You also have the timer. You have multiple different grid overlays to help out with composition. I personally like the overlay with the most lines. I use these grid lines to line up my props and fabrics to make sure that they're in line with the edge of my frame. And also in this menu is the level, which I'll turn on because, man, that is my biggest struggle with the phone, I guess because it tilts so easily in my hand. So this level has markers to make sure that the image is level left to right and top to bottom as well. This is super important for when you're taking those flat lay images because a little tilt left or right or top to bottom could make it look like the food and all the props are just sliding off the frame. Over here you can turn on to show highlight clipping areas or parts of your photo that are overexposed. I'll turn that on as well. And last but not least is this button to control manual focus. This is really cool and you'll see it in a little bit. Basically as you slide it back and forth, it adds these green little highlights to tell you whether or not you're in focus. All right, that's it for customizing the camera app on my phone. Let's get this up and over the table for some tasty natural light goodness. Now I personally like to use a tripod when I'm shooting with my phone up and over the table. It just gives me so much more stability and allows me to style, you know, kind of hands-free and look at the screen at the same time. Now if you're shooting food photography with your smartphone, I would recommend that you get at least these two pieces of gear. One would be a tripod with a center column that can stretch out and over the table. The second piece of gear here that I recommend is this little super clamp. They're really useful in the studio. They're cheap, they're like 25 bucks. I'll place the link in the description. You attach the tripod base to the bottom of the super clamp, click that onto your tripod, twist that up and slide your phone in. Give this a little twist and your phone is clamped down and secure. I'm sure there's a ton of great solutions out there for holding your phone, but I had all this gear lying around the studio anyways and it's just perfect for hands-free smartphone photography. All right, to set up the camera, I'm gonna turn the white balance to daylight. The ISO, I'm gonna turn to 100. Then for the shutter speed, you can see that I have the clipping highlights turned on. So as I slide it, you can see these little zebra lines here warning me that my highlights are overexposed. Now for the manual exposure, I don't know if you can see this here, but as I slide it back and forth, these little green highlights appear, letting me know when I'm properly in focus. Now, once I'm in focus, I'll just take the picture. I might experiment with a little white card to bounce some of this beautiful natural light back into my photo, or maybe even a black card to flag off some of that light at the top of the frame there. But that's pretty much it for this photo. Let's cook up another recipe, take this entire setup and move on into the studio. Now, I'm gonna light this image with this Godox SLB-60 constant light with this large soft box. Now, if you're somebody who struggles with working with natural light, or it's cloudy outside all day, or it's winter seven months out of the year, or something like that, if you're in that situation, then you're definitely gonna wanna pick up one of these lights. I made a whole video about it, it's right here, but this one is a little bit more expensive because it comes with a battery, but they do make one that you plug straight into the wall, and it's around $100 to $150 or something like that. It's perfect for that 24-7 year-round studio photography. I think a big beginner mistake a lot of people make when it comes to lighting is not first figuring out where the viewer is in the photo. Before I move the light, I wanna know where the viewer's going to be sitting. Is it gonna be here, here, here, or here? I mean, that's really going to affect the orientation of the photo. If the viewer is sitting here, then it most likely will be a horizontal, and I wanna compose to that. If it's over there, it's going to be a vertical. I always wanna style to the viewer's perspective. Now, for me, I kind of always like to have the light coming from opposite of the viewer. It kind of makes me uncomfortable when the light is passing through the viewer's perspective. For this photo, I don't think I wanna have direct side lighting from over here or over here. I think I want to actually angle this light in a little bit more. One more thing I wanna do before I make this final image is actually use this white card to bounce some of this light back into this shadow side. It was getting a little dark with the food on the shadow side, so I think this white card is gonna help out a lot. All right, right off the bat, it's really dark, so I'm gonna change the shutter speed to around 180th. Then I'm gonna switch my white balance to tungsten to match my constant lights. The ISO is already set to 100, and for the manual focus, you can really see those green highlights now. Let me get my fingers out of the way there. And once I have it in focus, I can take the picture. Now let's jump into editing these two images. Okay, for this natural light image with these beautiful peaches, I have this scroll bar with all of my available controls to edit with. I'm gonna start with the light. I'll add some contrast, and as I drag this slider, you can see that it removes the overlay while I'm sliding, so I can see the effects that it has on the image. I think I'll go around maybe plus 20 for the contrast. The highlights look good, but maybe I'll increase those shadows a little bit too to around maybe plus 40-ish. Now I'm gonna tap on the color icon as it's looking a little bit warm, so I'm going to knock this temp down to around 4,800. I think that looks more accurate. The vibrance, that mid-tone saturation, I'll bump up to around plus 20, and then I'll move over to the effects icon. For now, I'll go to the clarity and increase that to plus, I don't know, 20-ish. It's looking good, and I think the photo is still looking a little bit washed out, so I'll play with this dehaze slider, and I think I'll bump it up to about plus 20 as well. Over in the optics icon, I wanna make sure that both remove chromatic aberrations and lens corrections are enabled. Then I'm gonna scroll over to the selections tab. I think I wanna brighten up those shadows on the plate there from the peaches. I'll press the plus icon and then the brush icon, and then select a feathered brush and paint on top of those shadows. Then I'll hit the light icon down here and increase the exposure slider to, well, I think around 0.8 is looking good, and I'm done. Now I can share this photo with a couple of different options. Tap on this share icon up top here, and you get a menu with options. The top one here allows you to airdrop it to your computer or send it via email. Then you could also save it to your camera roll and just upload it to Instagram. I just love how easy that is, but I have one more cool thing I wanna show you. Back into the editing, I pulled up the image that I shot in the studio. Now if I scroll through the icons at the bottom here, all the way over to the right are your presets. Click up top here, and you can scroll through all the different presets you have synced with your desktop version of Lightroom. And oh, look what I got here. WeEatTogether presets for food photographers. And that's just super exciting. I just launched the 35 Lightroom food presets over on my site, weeatogether.com. You can go download them there. For this shot, I can click through a few of them here, but I think I tested out the wild bass preset, and it looks pretty good with just one click. Here are both photos after the editing. You can see a little before and after version of each one of these photos. And I really like how I was able to control the camera using the Lightroom app with my smartphone. And of course, editing in Lightroom is super easy, especially when you're using the presets. There are a lot of great presets in that pack. It just makes life super simple, but do you know who else makes life super simple? Skillshare. This video is sponsored by Skillshare. If you haven't heard of Skillshare, people, it's time to check them out. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes, covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills. Explore classes in everything from photography and creative writing to marketing, productivity, and just so much more. Premium membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts working in their fields to help you gain new skills and just live your life to its best. Skillshare is also incredibly affordable, with annual memberships costing you less than $10 a month. Currently, I'm diving into the Introduction to SEO course because man, oh man, does my website need some help in SEO. This course is being taught by Ran Fishkin. There's a ton of stuff to learn here, all about keywords and strategies and just analyzing your statistics. It's packed full of a lot of great information. So if your website's like mine, it's just an SEO abomination, then check out this course, check out Skillshare. Click on my link right here to get two months of Skillshare Premium for free. I'll place that link in the description of this video below. But as always, if you like this video, please hit that subscribe button, ring that notification bell, give it some thumbs up, drop some comments down below. I love hearing from you guys. And as always, I'll see you in the next one.