Welcome to part four in Behind the Scenes, where I talk about the photography portion of this blog (and maybe other things, if you request it or if I feel inspired). On the agenda today: garnishes.

If you’re into food photography the way I am, this is actually a scintillating subject. If you aren’t, I apologize in advance. Feel free to come over later for some consolation cookies.

So. When it comes to photographing a dish, garnishes are super important. It might taste amazing, but that’s only the first step. The taste has to translate in the image or I can’t (read: won’t) post it. And garnishes help a lot with the translation.

One of the most common garnishes? Fresh herbs.

Fresh herbs are especially useful with soups, which can be hard to deal with. They’re just not photogenic the way, say, donuts tend to be. But an herb gives any bowl of soup a serious boost.

When I look at that photo of red lentil & sweet potato soup, my eye goes to the center of the bowl first — right to the parsley and sweet potato. And that’s where I want your eyes to go, too.

Here’s another one.

Without those pretty little mint leaves in the middle, this soup is horribly ugly. I mean, there’s a reason I jazzed it up with a lime green bowl and that bright fabric. Look past those things, and you realize that the soup itself is essentially a bowl of white stuff. It has some cool flavors and everything. It just isn’t pretty.

Speaking of a bowl of white stuff…

Isn’t it great what a minuscule amount of sliced scallion will do for a dish of tzatziki? (It’s also great what a spoonful of tzatziki will do for a latke. You could eat latkes plain, of course, but seriously — add some tzatziki next time. You won’t look back.)

And if you reaaaaaally don’t want to spend the extra few minutes turning sour cream into tzatziki, regular sour cream is also acceptable. In case you were wondering.

One more thing, and then I promise I’ll stop talking about fresh herbs: I feel like it goes without saying, but…what makes fresh herbs an awesome garnish choice is that they’re fresh.

Imagine how much better this photo would have been if I had used fresh oregano on the roasted tomato sauce. Yeah. A lot better. (Did I have fresh oregano on hand? Clearly not. Does my makolet typically stock fresh oregano? Even more clearly not.)

Another popular garnish choice is the ever-present lemon wedge. You see it in drinks all the time, right? But I liked how it looked in this bowl cup of pasta. And since the recipe uses fresh lemon juice, it totally worked.

When it comes to sweet things, one of my favorite garnishes is whipped cream and chocolate shavings. It does involve a bit of work, since I’ve yet to see whipped cream sold in spray cans here. When I want just a bit for decoration, I whip up the liquid version in my KitchenAid (in the past, I would spend a good five minutes doing this with a hand mixer).

Fortunately, making chocolate shavings slash chocolate curls isn’t a big deal. You just “peel” a bar of chocolate with a regular veggie peeler, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a beauty queen of a dessert.

Isn’t this coffee granita beautiful? I thought so, too.

Finally, never underestimate the power of maple syrup on a stack of pancakes.

Specifically, never underestimate the value of your husband pouring endless amounts of maple over said pancakes while you try to capture the golden drizzle at just the right angle.

Yeah, I paid him in pancakes.

Previously in Behind the Scenes: intro, food scenes, and fill it up.

It’s been more than three months since I blogged about photography, so I figured it was about time for something new in this section.

Today I want to talk about something so small that part of me questions whether it even warrants a post of its own: Filling dishes for a photo.

Let me show you what I mean.

In this photo from my iced coffee post, there’s a good inch of space between the coffee and the top of the glass. {Shudder.}

Now look at this one from my recent post on iced coffee milkshakes. Isn’t it amazing how much better it looks when that glass is filled to the top? (Okay, the chocolate shavings clearly don’t hurt, either.)

But it isn’t always enough to fill the cup/bowl/plate with food. Sometimes you need a little help. Like, from a towel.

You can’t see it, but I filled at least half of this bag with an old raggedy kitchen towel to bring the popcorn up to very top. There was no way I was using anything but this popcorn bag for those photos, and I just didn’t feel like popping more.

I mean, it wasn’t like I had been saving the bag for, say, an entire year since I found a pack of them in the dollar store during last summer’s trip to the States.

In times like those, it makes sense to use a bit of back-up. But sometimes it doesn’t.

…Like when I decided to use oh, the biggest glass bowl we own to showcase my baked bbq sweet potato chips.

I stuffed the bowl with smaller bowls, then strategically placed the chips in just the right places.

If it makes you feel better, I still made an inordinate amount of chips. Which was okay. We ate them. They were good.

But seriously. I didn’t have to do that. I could have used smaller bowls…which I did, afterward.

Live and learn, right?

Cook and learn…style and learn…photograph and learn.

Thanks for watching this episode of Photography at MQP. Stay tuned for the next one!

Welcome to the second post in a behind-the-scenes series on photography at More Quiche, Please. Missed the intro? You can catch up here.

There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to food photography: You can (1) create “food scenes” to help show off your dishes or (2) just take photos of your food, finished products or otherwise, however they appear in the moment.

There really isn’t a right or wrong way to do it, and I suspect you’ll find yourself taking some of each. I know I do.

I often (but certainly not always) start a recipe post with a food scene photo. This gives readers a sense of what’s in the recipe before they even start reading.

A food scene typically includes two or three main ingredients alongside the finished dish, like with the zucchini bread photo up there. It might also show something that goes well with the dish, like a glass of milk next to your cookies or a nice, hearty piece of bread next to that soup you just made.

These photos tend to look more polished, more put-together. Which I like. Or love.

But that isn’t to say that the more causal ones don’t also have their place. Often, these are “process” photos — you know, the ones that show a middle step of a recipe.

Like these. I liked these.

But there are also the photos that happen for no reason other than that something catches my eye.

Like a persimmon.

This lil’ dude was sitting on a baking tray as I worked on some persimmon raisin cookies the other week, and it just looked so cool.

So I snapped a photo. Okay, maybe two.

But what do all of these photos have in common?

They’ve all got clean backgrounds — pretty much essential, I’d argue, for any good photograph.

This doesn’t mean there can’t be anything in the background. But whatever is there should add to the photo, not distract.

Before I realized the importance of this, I took almost all of my food photos facing my bookshelf. Really, this makes no sense. But the bookshelf was there, and it showed up in my photos.

Yeah. Way too much going on behind the lentils. [Cringe.]

So really, it doesn’t matter whether your clean background is a white tablecloth, a cloth napkin, an oversized polka-dotted pillow case, a sheet of parchment paper, or a cool scrap of fabric. They all do the job.

…Oh, and this one?

That’s the silk scarf my sister-in-law brought us from India.

I got an email from a fellow food blogger today, asking for tips on food photography. I’m pretty new to the scene, but I’m happy to share what I’ve learned so far.

Because this is something I’m passionate about (“this” meaning food, cooking, baking, eating, food styling, and food photography), I have plenty to say on the topic. This will be the first post in a series, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

So. Let’s begin with the beginning, shall we?

I think I’ve always loved taking pictures of my food. But “always” really only dates back to Chanukah 2004, when my parents surprised me with my first real camera.

I was in seminary at the time, and they had sent it to Israel a month earlier with a friend. I kept the wrapped gift in my closet until the appointed night, when I opened it with my three roommates after we lit our menorahs. I was so excited that I cried.

The photo folders on my laptop from 2005 are filled with over-exposed, cluttered, out-of-focus, or otherwise awful pictures. Awful…but priceless.

Like this one.

Um, what? Does this mean that I not only ate a bright pink tuna wrap, but that I also wanted to capture the moment for eternity?

And did I eat it in the dead of night?

And was that neon orange toothpick really sticking out of the wrap at a 90 degree angle?

Thankfully, things were looking up by 2010, when I snapped a picture of this bread bowl at Beit Ticho in Jerusalem.

Yes, it was awesome. I love that place.

These days, I take photos of my cooking all.the.time. And I’m happy to report that they’re generally a lot more like the bread bowls of 2010 than the tuna wraps of 2005.

But here’s where I’m going with all this:

Tip #1: You don’t have to be a professional to get great photos…but you do have to practice.

I never went to culinary school, and I never took classes or attended workshops on food styling or food photography. I never even read a book on food photography, though there are a bunch I’d love to own.

But I practice. I experiment. I play around.

A lot.

I’m not the super artsy type who wakes up in the morning, brimming with 12 new ideas for creative, fun, delicious photos. But I push myself to keep thinking up new ways to show off a dish.

Like with muffins: Everyone makes muffins. Every food blogger has muffin posts. I realized around the time I posted my fifth muffin recipe that I could legitimately create a muffin section in my recipe index.

But how many times can you photograph muffins sitting on a table, or a bunch of muffins on a pretty serving platter? Bo-ring.

I was mulling this over the day I baked a fresh batch of oatmeal chocolate chip muffins.

And then I realized something fantastic.

The muffins were the same size as the oversized polka dots on the pillowcase I had borrowed from my neighbor.

Would this photo have been even better if I had ironed the pillowcase first? Yes, come to think of it.

Do I own an iron? No.

This is fun. Let’s do it again! Stay tuned…