Recipe Book Photos

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make your own recipe book. It's likely to discuss photography when dealing with cookbooks. A lot of the times you'll see a lot of cookbooks where there's all these beautiful pictures on every single page, those are nice because they show you what the end result is supposed to look like, if you can't visualize. If you're going to use photographs, use photographs of the end product. I think it's kind of a waste to do step by step photos, unless you're making a guide to cooking, unless you're making like a you know, beginner's cookbook, or how to cook a very specific you know, type of technique like cooking in a tandoori oven for example, you might actually want - or cooking in a brick oven or cooking over an open flame. Photos -step by step photos might be necessary. Or something that's really intensive, or if there's a special cut to like a piece of fish or a piece of meat or something like that. But for the most part you can leave those out. Most people who are reading cookbooks already have enough knowledge to where they don't need to know you know what it looks like to mix up you know an egg with flour, or they don't need to know what it looks like to you know to whip butter. Most of them what they're looking for is a photograph of the end result, because that way they'll know, they can compare their end product, you know with your recipe's end product, and try to get an idea for you know does mine look right? 'Cause if you gave - most people just - if you gave someone a recipe, another person a recipe, and neither one of them had any idea what it's supposed to look like, you're going to come up with two different end results for a presentation standpoint. You know that's why typically I think the presentation photos are important but the how to, like the step by step photos aren't as important, like I said, unless you're doing something that's particular difficult. Or particularly I guess uncommon. Also, at the same time, photographs of the food in my opinion should be done or at least semi-professionally, you know you'll want to use a light box, things like that to really stage the food and make it look great, because photographing food is exceptionally difficult because of all the difficult because of all the different colors and textures and reflective surfaces and make sure you choose the right plates, and you know, get the fingerprints off the plates and things like that. And you know using a professional photographer they'll also know how to stage the food properly along with yourself or whoever the chef is who is setting it up. It generally helps that - especially if it's for public consumption - if this is something you're going to try to sell, you know you're going to want that to look as good as possible because I don't know how many times - and you can do it yourself. You can go online and look at some of the online recipe forums and look at some of the like the self photos and they're pretty bad. You'll want to use a good camera, great lens, lots of good lighting. You don't want to trust your little point and shoot flash camera to take the best quality pictures, so, anyway, that being said, that's all I got to say about photography."