weirdest thing

I've never really shot food but i've looked up some of the crazy things you have to do. motor oil on pancakes cereal in glue etc. whats the craziest thing you've done to food to get the perfect shot?

I have a book about food styling. The key seems to be that cooked food starts to look bad as soon as you finish cooking it (shrivels, dries out etc). So the key seems to be to under/not cook the food and then paint it with whatever bizarre mixtures you can find to make it look like you cooked it.

You need to be aware of rules about this in your local area.

Its illegal in the UK (and possibly the EU as our rules usually match) to put non edible substances on food for sales images.

I presume it is considered to be misrepresentation of the product and therefore some sort of illegal fraud.

Hmmm, perhaps we have found the root cause of why food in the UK was so without merit 40 years ago...they could not make it appealing in photographs, either, as the photography would give false impressions about food quality?!

Perhaps as the food situation has so greatly improved in recent decades, the photography will upgrade itself to match, with more lenient rules about photography. After all, restaurants need to lure in the clientele with their eyes, so they will discover that the food is indeed wonderfully flavorful, to correspond with the photography.

Food photography IMO has come on in leaps & bounds...............p​ossibly because of the boom in cookery books in the past couple of decades.

MidnightUK wrote in post #18550405
You need to be aware of rules about this in your local area.

Its illegal in the UK (and possibly the EU as our rules usually match) to put non edible substances on food for sales images.

I presume it is considered to be misrepresentation of the product and therefore some sort of illegal fraud.

No idea about the above but would surmise misrepresentation is relevant. The one thing I would like to read about is legal fraud ~ sounds dodgy to me