Our streets are filled with attractive posters and hoardings featuring various food items. For many years, food has been used to advertise many products including itself and companies or hotels making them. A cookbook will have no takers if it’s done without photographs of the foods being features there. Cookbooks are filled with mouth watering photographs of foods taken in various angles and arrangements. All this tells us that food photography is a genre that is here to stay and one that one can’t go wrong with if taken as a business as long as the skills and tricks are well mastered.

Food photography is still photography that aims at photographing foot items in a way to make them appealing and attractive for use in advertising, cookbooks, menus and ingredients. Photographing food requires special skills and techniques since dealing with foods is challenging due to the way they lose their visual value quickly. Here is a short munch into this delicious genre of food photography.

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You might have seen those pictures taken without make up, or without following any rules including the rule or thirds. You might have taken time to look at them, at times you may have laughed or just smiled but never realized they were not planned and ended up breaking all basic photography rules yet you remember them more than the ones you have seen on covers of magazines! What you saw were products of street photography, a photography genre that aims at capturing your subjects in their candid best with no or little interaction with the camera or photographer.

According to Wikipedia, “Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and other settings.” The London Festival of Street Photography came up with a close definition though they took a more liberal route when they defined street photography as, “un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings.” The two definitions clearly bring out the meaning of this fun genre of photography. Let’s explore further a few aspect of street photography.

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One of the greatest dilemma you may face as a photographer (amateur or professional) is the type of gear to use for each photography genre. The sad thing is that most amateurs don’t have options and so they put their only camera and lenses on a hard drive and in the end they don’t get good photos for certain photography sessions. Photography gear is as important as other tools are for other trades. Doing photography with the wrong gear is like a carpenter trying to make a table using farming tools!

When one hears of gear guide, he or she may expect a short but comprehensive guide to what gear to use that will fit the needs of all photography genre. That is not the case. The complexity of photography gear lies in the fact that for each genre of photography, you may need a completely different gear. For example, if you are doing wildlife photography, you will need lenses with super reach but this may not be the case if you are doing wedding photography or micro photography. For the sake of this article, we will briefly look into a few common photography genres and the gear you can use.

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