Photographing Meat & Poultry
photographing meat & poultry
Lighting
I believe, much like photographing any other food product, keeping the lighting natural yields the best results for photographing your meat and poultry products.
Raw meat is often translucent, so sympathetic lighting is essential, to advertise the high quality and safety of your raw meat, a factor customers will consider before buying it.
Spark your customers’ imaginations
Over the years, one of the best ways to market your meat and poultry products is to photograph it in the process of cooking. Showing meat in this state will easily spark the imagination and excitement of customers.
This method is particularly successful when you’re approaching summer barbeque season, and holidays such as Christmas, when your customers are buying large amounts of meat.
Some perfect examples of presenting your meat in this half cooked state include:
- A fillet about to be stuffed, or wrapped in bacon and ready for cooking
- An attractive hand sprinkling herbs or lemon juice over a salmon steak
- A pork chop half-encrusted in breading, so you can still see the raw meat in the photographs
- Steak, along with the raw ingredients of a sauce or marinade (red wine, fresh oregano or cloves of garlic all work well)
Props and food styling
If you plan to photograph your meat or poultry cooked, one of the best things you can do to prepare your meat for the photoshoot is to show it cooked slightly less than normal. Unlike cooking to eat - you are cooking purely for appearance. This will help with marketing your products as succulent and tender.
By knowing your target audience, you can far more effectively market your meat. For example, restaurants will find tight, close-up shots of their dishes work far more for their menus than raw meat photography.
Similarly, supermarkets or butchers can sell their raw meat as part of an aspirational lifestyle if their photoshoots show a rustic table or additional ingredients in their food photography.
