In this picture, only one of the scoops is real ice-cream.
We have no doubt you can tell that the fake one is on the right.
The pictures were not taken professionally nor styled by a team of people skilled in the craft of food photography. But can you tell what it is made of? We reveal all at the end of this article.
A brief enquiry found that many people buy recipe books for the pictures although they don’t cook much. But those pictures that get people drooling aren’t always what they seem.
Under hot studio lights, food quickly loses its good looks and starts to appear unappetising. That’s why professional food photographers and stylists normally practise with real props but use a stand-in for the actual food.
Once they get all the elements right, like lighting and composition, they bring in the “star” for the final shots.
Glycerin is an essential tool in food photography (despite its chemical sounding name, it’s edible and used a lot in cake frosting). Stylists paint it onto food to keep it looking moist and fresh. A few squirts of glycerin mixed with water and you get long-lasting droplets of water.
Steam is made with dry ice, but a cigarette or stick of incense would work as well.
On his website, American food photographer Dennis Davis recounts a shoot for an advertisement in which a turkey was painted with gravy and shoe polish, then browned with a blowtorch and varnished to look beautifully cooked and glossy as the centrepiece in a Thanksgiving dinner. And under it all was a raw bird!
The ad was not for roast turkey, however, as under United States law, advertisements for food must show the actual food item that a consumer would be able to buy and eat. So an ad for a breakfast cereal may show a bowl of the manufacturer’s actual cornflakes, for example, but the milk may be white glue, which, unlike milk, doesn’t make the cereal go soggy so quickly.
Here are some other tricks of the trade: Coffee and tea are often just food colouring mixed into water; sandwiches are often held together with toothpicks when they’re photographed and the toothpicks are later removed with photo editing software; and to keep a scoop of ice-cream from melting too fast, it is sometimes frozen solid with dry ice.
We hope we haven’t shattered your illusions.
As for our poor imitation of ice-cream, well, only the cherry on top is real. The scoop is mash potato and the “caramel sauce” is a substance that is used for its viscosity and stability. It’s engine oil.
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06-18-2008, 02:54 PM
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