Food photography

[ah_sadaf]

Hi everyone,

I had edited this pic using Picasa but am not satisfied entirely. I had used natural lighting for this but since it was afternoon the light was very harsh, so I did auto contrast, auto color and fixed shadows. Please let me know how can it be improved.

[windrider86]

Welcome,
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[BigFuzzy]

Yeah, as Windrider says, putting in some more info such as exif info would help us a lot.

Having said that, I have two main issue with this image.
1. Focus - just does't seem sharp. Any type of food/macro/still life should be as sharp as possible (where there is detail, obviously shallow DoF doesn't count). Part of it is because of the harsh lighting which kills both color and details and shadows.
2. Lighting - the harsh light and direction of light simply kills this image for me. Plus it puts unpleasant reflections in the glass. Photographing reflective subjects is always difficult when dealing with the lighting. Your light needs to come from a direction that will not be reflected at the camera and the rest of the possible reflected area should be dark so as to not show up in the glass (I think I can make out the curtains on the left of the glass).

If I knew what camera you were using, I'd be able to say more. But looking at this, I'm assuming it's not an SLR.. right? I say this because I was going to suggest trying more creative angles to take advantage of creative use of Depth of Field which is common in food photography. But DoF is very difficult with a digicompact.

In the end, it's an interesting subject that, for me, was killed by the harsh lighting. Keep trying!