Up Your Foodstagram Game With These 11 Simple Steps For Normal People

Staging your shot is really the most important step in nailing your Instagram because after you leave that restaurant you can edit all you want, but you can't retake the photo. It's also the step that can be the most disruptive -- think pushing the glasses, condiments and menus over to the other side of the table to get them out of the shot. But it's a necessary evil. Do it for the Insta. 

Natural light should always be your first choice for shooting food. Indoor lights are generally fluorescent, harsh, and cast nasty shadows and tint on your food. If you're in your own home positioning yourself near a window or even outside is easy, but at a restaurant, if you're really serious about your food pics, request a seat by a window or outdoors. 

A clean shot doesn't mean you should only have one thing in the picture (really, you probably shouldn't just have one thing very often), but it does mean there shouldn't be any spare napkins, odd gaps or random items sneaking in. 

Think this way: everything in your photo should tell a story or contribute to the story you're telling. If something doesn't serve that purpose, push it out of the way. 

The most common food-stagram shot is definitely the overhead view, and for some food this does really look great (particularly if you're eating in a group) but sometimes other angles work well too. In this photo, my ice cream would have much less texture from above, you wouldn't be able to see the waffle cone and you'd lose the vertical depth of the double scoop. 

If your sandwich doesn't have all the bright veggies your mother recommends, for the sake of the photo, drag in that floral centerpiece for a nice pop. You can also use dishes, utensils, towels or beverages to brighten up a dull photo -- get creative with your color! 

Texture can mean a lot of things in food, it can be as simple as some added garnish, a broken and stacked cookie, a big bite taken from your donut, or a spreading of flour. But no matter how you create it, adding texture and depth into your photo makes your food more visually appealing and realistic too -- who rolls out cookie dough without a good layer of flour underneath? 

Just as a preliminary note, if for some reason you're using the Instagram app to take photos, STOP. NOW. Instagram's camera app is a lower quality overall than your built-in version, and you'll need to upload your photo from your Camera Roll into editing apps in the next step, anyway. 

Yes, this artistic concept definitely applies to food photography. When snapping your photo, mentally draw horizontal and vertical lines to create 9 little boxes on your screen (or activate your grid lines in your camera app for a super easy visualization) and use them to line up an eye-catching shot in one of a few ways: 

1) Put your focus item in either the top or bottom third of the shot (Pictured above) 

2) Line up the focal points along the grid lines themselves

3) Center your focal item at one of the four junction spots where grid lines intersect 

Like unnatural light, a flash creates a harsh burst of light that will distort colors and cast strange shadows on your food. If you're desperate for more light, have a friend shine their phone flashlight for you. 

The biggest tip here is that you should embrace the myriad of free editing apps available to you. I use VSCO for nearly every photo because it gives me the options to tweak just about everything imaginable in your photo. 

With all the options in VSCO, it's easy to get carried away adding a little of everything to your photo, but as you do more and more, you end up losing the original quality of your meal. 

I opt for editing only two or three qualities (usually clarity or sharpness, highlights/shadows, and saturation) to make sure my food photo does still resemble the food sitting in front of me. 

If you're new to editing sans filter, experiment! Don't know what exactly saturation changes or what low temperature looks like? Drag the bubble to the extremes and see the changes to help you learn what adjustments you prefer.

The photo on the left is my iPhone's shot, while the one on the right is Foodie's auto-edited version and while it's not perfect (my arm is making a pretty nasty shadow), I'd say the right looks way more appetizing. 

Foodie is a fabulous app I recently discovered that is made specifically for shooting and editing food photos. It includes tons of food-specific filters (with adorable topical names), but the coolest feature is for all those overhead shots. When taking a photo within the Foodie app, a built in photo leveler lets you know when the camera is perfectly positioned above the table. 

So you've staged and edited the perfect brunch photo, but in order to see the biggest reach on Instagram there are a few things you can still do. 

Pros: Hashtags automatically increase the reach of your photo thanks to the huge community of Instagrammers out there and make your photos easily searchable in the future 

Cons: Hashtags can be extremely overwhelming to read while your viewers scroll through their feeds and in short, they're sort of "out of style" for regular people Instagrammers who aren't curating a blog or working on a paid following. 

That said, there are a few ways around it: I'll hashtag to be a part of a national movement (eg. National Popcorn Day) and sometimes I'll comment on my own photo again after a comment or two with a number of applicable hashtags so they're searchable but not dominating my caption -- more to come on this. 

A clever caption will up your Instagram game immediately. It should be something relatively short and quippy (unless of course it's an obligatory birthday post where you write a short novel to your BFF) but for the most part, captions are there not to describe what's going on in the photo -- that's what the photo is for -- but to add a funny and witty note to your perfect photo.