Food Photography! Tips on Selling Your Food Images

So what can you do with your succulent-looking digital food images? Hah! That’s the easy part. Just think about where you see food images. Right! They’re literally all around you. Try some of your local eateries. Order your favorites, but first take a few well-poised shots of that scrumptious, triple-decker “whamburger” or “snook salad”. Turn the plate around to have different views. Shoot from a bit above. Get close up (with the camera, not your mouth just yet). Try a couple of table-level shots. Now get some images of your partner eating that thick, juicy, all-meat or veggie burger. You’ll do best showing just the hands wrapped around it.

Local, regional and even national fast-food and restaurant chains would snap up photos of their products with a local flavor to them. Look at newspapers and magazines too. Not just the glitzy, slick-cover rags that cost the price of a dinner. It’s better to check out smaller, local publications. Don’t forget food and culinary arts trade magazines and other similar publications either. Sure, they use the “pros” all the time, but will hardly turn down a good shot taken locally (by you of course). Just look for a local angle for your photos. For example, local, well-known executives, politicians, actors, musicians, sports figures and other “big wig celebrity” types enjoying local foods. They eat too, you know. Search through interviews and news stories. Find out what they like and cash in on it. Can you image the value of a hometown shot of Barack Obama, John McCain or Sarah Palin eating a “whamburger” (or whatever) during his youth or even more recently? Would that restaurant, fast food chain or beverage company pay you for that photo? You darn skippy they would! (and not peanuts, either).

Look at these two examples: Barack Obama likes his waffles!...and his hot dogs!

Go online and the number of potential markets goes up like a Space Shuttle launch. There are newsletters, websites, food and cooking review pages, blogs and advertisers galore virtually everywhere you look. We can’t leave out the food and food product manufacturing and processing companies either now, can we? You know some of the big names like Campbell’s, Bird’s Eye, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Beatrice, Post, Heinz, McCormick and Kellogg’s.

There aren’t dozens more, there are HUNDREDS more – THOUSANDS more if you go national and international. Is that enough potential markets for you yet?

The snack food and dessert foods industries are nearly insatiable clients for unique, interesting digital photographs of their cakes, cookies, pies, ice creams, candies, sweets and desserts of every description. Take your pick. Whatever you like, practice with images from every conceivable view point. Get images of children, the elderly and people at work enjoying their favorite snack and you’ll ultimately come up with saleable winning photographs. Sell them, rent them out or publish them on stock photography sites – a HUGE client for all manner of digital photos.

In the next continuing segment of this article series, we’ll look at digital photography techniques for food photography in more detail. See you then.