Anyone making a good living from food photography?

I love to cook and just ordered a book on food photography and was just thinking if people can make a good living from photographing food? Any takers on this?

Aside from publishing a book on the topic, can a freelance photographer make a good living from food photography?

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance.

I think food photography works more with blogging. There are so many recipe blogs and for one to think yummy I should try that recipe, there needs to be an excellent quality photo of that food. I know I would want the food more if I see the picture with the recipe.

Yes I've seen many of these which was what got me thinking about food photography

Buy the book Photographers Market. You may find companies who deal with food photography to where you can submit your images too.

It's possible, but I think it's rare. There's a guy in the city where I grew up who was good enough at it to get the right contracts, so he was the go-to photographer for products featured in Vons grocery store ads. (Vons is the "Safeway" of the Southern California and Las Vegas areas.) He also does some work for food product manufacturers.

He can shoot just about any product, but his portrait work is just so-so. Kind of goes to show that if you're going to specialize in something like food, you'd better be good! Good enough to make your living at it even if it's the one thing you're good at.

Lindsey wrote: Yes I've seen many of these which was what got me thinking about food photography

Awesome. Well get practicing on food photography and see if you can offer your skills to those food bloggers

You could always contact local restaurants and offer to take photos of their dishes for menus or other advertising they may be doing.

I have a friend and a family member that does this for a living and they make around $200,000 a year.

It's easily the hardest field of photography to do (besides wartime PJ, but that's another story) and requires a full team to be streamlined.

If you wanna do it for money on the side, it's manageable. At full time status making good money you have to have A LOT of skill and have a lot of money to back the venture.

Scotty wrote: I have a friend and a family member that does this for a living and they make around $200,000 a year.

It's easily the hardest field of photography to do (besides wartime PJ, but that's another story) and requires a full team to be streamlined.

If you wanna do it for money on the side, it's manageable. At full time status making good money you have to have A LOT of skill and have a lot of money to back the venture.

I'll bite - why is this more expensive to back? Are you talking about a kitchen as a studio? Because other wise they would just need to have a table and nice selection of plates, bowls, setting stuff, etc.? Am I missing anything? The camera gear should be close to what is used in other situations? Right?

I have only one tip that I can offer on Food Photography.... eat after the shoot

rmeyer7 wrote: It's possible, but I think it's rare. There's a guy in the city where I grew up who was good enough at it to get the right contracts, so he was the go-to photographer for products featured in Vons grocery store ads. (Vons is the "Safeway" of the Southern California and Las Vegas areas.) He also does some work for food product manufacturers.

He can shoot just about any product, but his portrait work is just so-so. Kind of goes to show that if you're going to specialize in something like food, you'd better be good! Good enough to make your living at it even if it's the one thing you're good at.

I agree to the above mentioned points. You need to be good at this and have some good contacts to start with.

For a start, why don't you take photos of some of your cooked food under various lighting and angles? this you can do along with reading the book.

I feel that even sites that deal with stock photography do have photos with food. so you can check out at any of those sites as well.

Wildfire wrote:

Scotty wrote: I have a friend and a family member that does this for a living and they make around $200,000 a year.

It's easily the hardest field of photography to do (besides wartime PJ, but that's another story) and requires a full team to be streamlined.

If you wanna do it for money on the side, it's manageable. At full time status making good money you have to have A LOT of skill and have a lot of money to back the venture.

I'll bite - why is this more expensive to back? Are you talking about a kitchen as a studio? Because other wise they would just need to have a table and nice selection of plates, bowls, setting stuff, etc.? Am I missing anything? The camera gear should be close to what is used in other situations? Right?

In order to make a good living with it, you need a full work load streamlined. You'll do close to a hundred food shoots in a day, and you'll need a few editors. You'll also need design people, and professional chefs that know the tricks of the trade, because you don't use normal food sometimes to get certain affects. For camera gear most of the time you want to use Tilt-shift lenses to be able to control the depth of field correctly and avoid blown highlights. You also need lighting assistants if you're working hot lights, and if you're running strobes. Almost everything is custom lit and you can't do it all.