Attempt at Food Photog

Took this from many angles to try and make it more interesting. Composition was big issue on this one. What do you think

You've got some blown highlights that need to be brought down.

You might want to increase your DOF or change your focal point - my eyes naturally want to look at the first piece, but it's slightly OOF and kinda throwing me off.

If you got a lower perspective it might engage the viewer more with the sushi and you'll get the "face" of the roll displayed instead of looking down upon it.

A pair of chopsticks in the background could be a nice touch and if this is for advertising or anything you'd definitely want to clean everything up more.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jeff

OK, I'll probably sound harsh, but I'm not bashing you, au contraire: I'm trying to help you out.

It's not a good image:

• It's too busy and too disordered. The eye is hopping all across the frame then yanked to the areas of focus in the centre.
  
• You have tangents. You have to watch out for those: look from the camera position and make sure no items are 'making contact'. In your photo the dishes are, and the tiny dish behind the long one looks like it's growing out of the food.
  
• You have a big empty space in the large dish, and it's right in the foreground. It looks messy, like someone was eating out of that dish and stepped aside so you could take the photo. In food photography, in general, the dishes should look full. Consider that, based on your point of view and angle you're using, you're trying to present the food to the viewer as if he were seated at the table ready to eat it; would you find it appetising to eat from a plate somebody else was just eating out of?
  

Thanks guys good stuff ill definitely be using these tips in my next effort.

What bothers me the most is that the left edge of the tray seems more in focus than any other part of the image. And the light area reflecting off the tray pulls my eye to that area.

Your white balance is off. It also looks like you have mixed lighting (back light from a window and overhead lighting from a bulb perhaps) That's really going to screw up your color balance. Try to keep your lighting to one type to make color correction easier.

And quite honestly composition is all a matter of taste. Do what you feel makes the photo look the best and don't rely on others to give you advice is my advice. In all honesty more advice in regards to composition can really negatively affect you own personal style. Don't try to follow the rules make your own rules.

I Agree with drumsfield on the the lighting. Keep it to one type of lighting. But if you were to choose, window light would be best in my opinion.

Also I've shot many types of sushi rolls like what you have shot, and I found it works best if you could just get a close up shot of a single piece. If you'd like to get a full view of the dish, it would be best if there is no background elements that are distracting and a complete roll would be needed. But most of the time complete sushi rolls shot in full view looking like caterpillars =)

I'm no expert, but I'd like to second these points that Alveric made. . .

Alveric wrote in post #17607839
It's too busy and too disordered. The eye is hopping all across the frame then yanked to the areas of focus in the centre.

You have tangents. You have to watch out for those: look from the camera position and make sure no items are 'making contact'. In your photo the dishes are, and the tiny dish behind the long one looks like it's growing out of the food.

. . . because, apart from the usual attention to give to composition in the artistic sense, an image of food that would be served to one person raises an additional concern. In that kind of shot, I want to see how everything in the near distance would look if I sat down in front of it. Your image has a napkin on the far side of the table. Whose napkin is that? Is it mine, or another diner's, or did it just happen to be left there? There are two little dishes of ginger and wasabi. If I ordered the sushi roll, I'd get just one of those. Chopsticks and an earthenware cup of tea would probably also be near my plate. Maybe a pitcher of soy sauce, too.

My first impression of the composition was that things were scattered randomly on the table. Tightening up your selection of objects to show, using the criterion of realistically representing the view from one seat at the table, could make the whole picture more ordered. The entree should be the primary gaze grabber.

drumsfield wrote in post #17611292
[..]
And quite honestly composition is all a matter of taste. Do what you feel makes the photo look the best and don't rely on others to give you advice is my advice. In all honesty more advice in regards to composition can really negatively affect you own personal style. Don't try to follow the rules make your own rules.

When you have no clue as to what makes a photo look best, how on Earth can you do what makes it look best? Or how can he follow, trust or even deem your advice worthy of the slightest consideration when you yourself are advising to ignore advice?

With all due respect, your 'advice' is as unhelpful as it is contradictory and self-defeating.

There's nothing to gain and much to lose by being a rebel and ditching all aesthetic notions of balance, harmony and effective visual communication. What begins as one's insistence on the right to decide what is attractive and what is ugly leads to aesthetical blindness and ends in flawed personal interpretations of good.

Yes, one is perfectly free to be a maverick and 'carve one's own' path and 'make one's own rules' and push forward 'one's own vision' however distorted or outré, just don't expect paying clients to buy it. Even non-photographers find images that break the natural 'rules' of harmony and attractiveness repelling–even though they won't be able to explain why.

Composition is photography's language, and like any language it has a set of rules and a normative (even though it's more flexible than that of grammar) not arbitrarily set by some old guy who thought it'd be cool to make it so, but in order to facilitate understanding and communication. How long would you be able to converse with someone who made his own grammar, fit he changing freely words adn telters saw as?