My Food Lens

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. How do you share your work when a client reaches out to you? How do you create a powerful photo collection to pitch to a client?  And do you tailor your portfolio every time? Creating a portfolio is one of the most underrated tasks  in  our creative lives but I can’t emphasize enough how  critical it is  if we are looking  to work with brands.  In th...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Learning and growing is a continuous process in a creative life.  As creatives our photography, our style, is continually evolving.  Never satisfied, we are forever flexing that creative muscle by seeking out different styles, trying out new gear, lenses, angles and pursuing different subjects to shoot.  We are learning, practicing and growing all th...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Instagram loves me.. Instagram loves me not.. Instagram loves me.. Instagram loves me not.. That's what our conversation with Instagram looks like. Right? It is a never ending cycle of love and hate, bitterness and sweetness. We can neither live with it nor without it. I know that instagram has garnered a lot of criticism recently and if we had...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Scroll through Facebook and 10 sponsored ads about photography courses show up.  Get on instagram and at least 20 reels of photoshoot BTS pop up. And that is because of the demand for good photos.  If you’ve wondered whether clients are looking for recipes or photos then, Natasha Miocha , everyone’s favorite person and food blogger tells us all about...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. As food photographers, as creatives, we start our journey with enthusiasm and passion for our art. We create for the joy of creating.  …But as we move forward, as we evolve in our skills and creativity, we also begin to face the struggle of creative blocks, purpose, and $$$. We begin to question -- - Where is this going? - How do I continue to create...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. We all have values.  We all stand for and against certain causes. Be it people, initiatives, practices, philosophies, products  -  we connect to some so strongly, feel so passionately that we believe in them, stand by them, support them.    Big or small, it doesn't matter. We all have values.  The one value I stand for, both personally and profe...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. If you’ve ever wondered …  What is commercial food photography? Can we make a career out of our love for photography?  What gear do we need? What does it take to work with big brands? What goes on behind the scenes in commercial food photography? What are the challenges? What to expect? Then join me as I speak to one of India's leading commercia...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Choosing the right camera angle might be straightforward for many of us, but is it really that straightforward? How do you decide what angle works best for your food? And once you take the shot, how do you know that you’ve photographed the food in its most photogenic angle?  Have you seen photos where the cup is more visible than the coffee inside or...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. We all love experiences, don’t we?  When we walk into a restaurant we look forward to delicious food  but also, good ambience, music & lighting.  We want the servers to be friendly, the manager to ask if we are comfortable and top notch service that makes us feel special.  When we leave, we don’t just judge the food, but we judge the whole experi...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Are you a props hoarder? As food photographers we just love props, don’t we? We see potential props everywhere, from discarded wooden boards on the street to our friend’s tableware.  There are never enough props in our cupboards and as we continue on our journey, all we do is buy more and more and more.  So while we love our props, it is important to...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Are you looking to collaborate with a brand?  Wouldn’t you love to get into their minds and crack the code?   What qualities do they look for in  social media influencers?  What “qualifications” make the cut? How many followers should you have? In the big ocean of social media, how do you make yourself “visible” to them?  How do you stand out? What i...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. You have the skills, the passion, and you’ve found your dream client.  You feel excitement at the prospect of working with them. You reach out but feel frustrated because you don’t hear back.  I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve spoken to photographers with new businesses and been discouraged by the pitching process.  Has that happen...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. You are at a restaurant. You are seated on a lovely table with beautiful sunlight  filtering through the trees. You order your favorite dish on the menu and sip on a refreshing glass of lemonade as you wait. The food arrives but instead of digging in, you bring out your phone, turn the plate so that the sun falls on the right spots and start taking p...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. If I’m not wrong, you have either a list of goals and resolutions for yourself this year OR you’re one of those who do not believe in setting resolutions.   I totally get it. Honestly, setting goals is the easy part. We can set as many goals as we want. Achieving those goals is the tough part.  I know! Often, we set goals and when we look at those go...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. It is that time of the year when we look back.. …but also look forward.   How about you? Are you putting your journey in perspective this December or planning resolutions for a rocking 2022?  For me, the road ahead is what I’ve been thinking of, but it is incomplete without looking back at 2021.   Which is why, I’ve a short and sweet bonus episode fo...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. "Are you a food photographer or a food stylist? You can only be one or the other”  – Do you hear this all the time?  And every time you plate food for the camera OR pitch to a client OR reach out to a brand OR create a recipe for your blog, you debate over what to call yourself?  Then, you go ahead and call yourself both, food stylist and food p...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. How many times have you been asked, “so, what’s your story here?” All the time. How many times have you heard the term storytelling in photography? Lost count.  What do most of our mentor photographers have in common? Strong visual storytelling skills.  Apart from technical skills, which other skill has the power to differentiate us from the competit...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. If you’ve wondered whether it’s worth creating a photography portfolio, and what to do after, join me as I speak to Shelly Waldman , a commercial and editorial photographer based in the San Francisco Bay area, and get blown-away hear her talk about the power of creating portfolios and the practice of getting a portfolio review. In this latest episode...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Do you have a love-hate relationship with Instagram?  I do.  While it’s such a fabulous platform for showcasing our work, it has also created an unnecessary race. When we come across a photo with 2000 likes, we begin to wonder what we are doing wrong and what those accounts are doing right to get so many likes. When we see accounts growing every day,...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Photography is so much more than just holding up a camera and taking a shot. It has many moving parts that can not only make or break a photo, but also determine our efficiency and quality of work. Correct?   Have you ever felt your back ache after standing for hours, trying to nail that flatlay? Have you ever started editing and realised the photo w...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Do you photograph everything you eat at a restaurant and bribe the kids to let you shoot for just a little longer before they dive into that delicious cake?  Do you sneak out time from your busy schedule just to take that one shot of steaming chai OR the vanilla cake you just took out of the oven OR that chicken you cooked for dinner?   Are you forev...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. Has it ever happened that you’ve known someone on Instagram and when they meet you they say, “You’re exactly the same in real life as you’re on social media.”    .. That, my friend, is called branding.   Branding is the way the world sees us and the image they hold of us.  And branding is not just for business owners, it is for anyone who creates wor...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. So, your dream client reached out to you ..And they want you to photograph their new range of food products ..And they are paying well.  Win-win. Whoop!   You are excited! What a terrific opportunity. Oh, but wait.. what? They want the photoshoot in their space.  But you’ve only been photographing at home, in your own space, in your own time.   What...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. We all have days when we wish we could perform better but a churning feeling inside us takes away the motivation to cook or photograph or engage in anything remotely creative. We want to pick up the camera, but it is a struggle to find the energy or inspiration to do so. This could be because a photoshoot didn’t go as well as expected OR a potential...

Love the episode? Send me a text & tell me. It’s Monday morning. You wake up at 6am.  You go for a walk by the river and come back refreshed. You sit down to work. You already have your tasks mapped out for the day. You begin. It’s been an hour & you’re killing it, striking off tasks from your list.   And then you take a break for a few mins.  You casually open Instagram. You’re scrolling...