Here’s a short and sweet video in which Chicago-based food photographer Stephen Hamilton shares some tips on how to take photographs of food using your smartphone. One tip is to use a white napkin as a makeshift reflector to fill in some of the shadows in the shot.

(via Doobybrain)

Here’s an eye-opening look at the world of food styling and photography, where Elmer’s glue is used for cereal milk, hamburgers are filled with sponges, brownies are sprayed with WD-40, and salad is padded with mashed potatoes. Food stylist Kim Krejca and photographer Rick Gayle discuss some of the tricks and techniques used to make food look as appetizing as possible while keeping it realistic. It’s an episode from Adorama’s How’d They Do That? series of videos.

(via f stoppers)

It’s pretty amazing how much work goes in to commercial food photography, even if it’s a delivery pizza. Domino’s Pizza has a short video showing the behind-the-scenes action during a pizza photo shoot, complete with food stylists, a pizza screwed to the table, and a hand model. But Domino’s new ad movement is all about ditching the food embellishments and promising “natural” photos from now on — photos of pizzas made by employees and untouched by food artists during the photo shoot. (Though we noticed they didn’t promise to go easy on post-processing!)

To promote their new photo style, the pizza chain is also running a photo contest for customers to submit photos of their own Domino’s pizza to be featured in upcoming ads. Winners get $500 — that could buy a lot of pizzas!