Dark food photography has become very popular among food and beverage photographers over the past couple of years. The key to creating beautiful dark food photography is understanding the interplay between light and shadow and shaping it so that the viewer's eye is directed naturally to the main subject.

Rustic and vintage styles are also often seen in these kinds of images since the wood and metal textures lend themselves well to a dark and moody atmosphere. In this post, we'll look at five techniques to help you successfully plan and shoot stunning dark and moody food photos.

What is a dark and moody food photography style?

Most food photography images can be placed more or less into one of two categories: light and bright or dark and moody. Light and bright images are often created with soft light and well-lit subjects - it works well for many types of food and drinks.

A dark food photography style is achieved when an image has a strong contrast between light and shadow. An Italian technique known as Chiaroscuro is often applied, which is what artists use to create a three-dimensional effect in their paintings, sketches and even black and white photography.

By shaping and manipulating light and shadow in your images, along with a few other intentional styling choices, you can easily create stunning dark and moody images too.

5 simple tips to master the dark and moody food photography look

1. Use a dark backdrop

The background you choose for your subject has a big impact on the overall look and feel of your image. Dark food photography works best when all the elements of your image complement each other and feel cohesive, so start by choosing a relatively dark backdrop and go from there.

Examples of dark and moody backdrops include rustic wooden tables, vintage baking trays or metal sheets, old newspapers and sheet music, dark walls and even dark fabrics and materials can be used to place your subject on.

You can also do a macro shot and fill the frame with your subject.

2. Choose complementing props

Now that you've chosen a backdrop, you can add some props to help style your scene and tell a story. Similarly to the backdrops, rustic and vintage props tend to work well and can create beautiful frames.

Matte cutlery (knives, forks and spoons that aren't shiny) are ideal and easy to find in second hand shops or antique stores. Hand-made pottery and ceramics, wooden boards and old books work well too. You can soften some of the wood and metal with soft fabrics, just make sure the colour and shade fits with the overall scene.

Don't feel like you have to use lots of props - minimalist scenes can be very striking for dark food photography!

3. Shape the light around your subject

Lighting is key in photography and you'll need to learn how to work with it to intentionally create beautiful dark food photos.

I tend to work with natural light and usually place my scene between one and three metres away from my light source (the window). You can then shape the light that falls onto your scene by using various tools to guide or block it from certain areas.

For example, you can use a diffuser to soften the light coming in through the window if it's a very bright day. Or you can use curtains, bounce boards and other household objects to block the light from hitting the area in the foreground or background of your scene, so that you can highlight the main subject clearly.

Read More: Light modifiers for natural light photography

Experiment and play with your scene, blocking light in different parts of your frame and take pictures as you go so that you can observe the differences in real-time.

4. Deepen the shadows using negative fill

Dark food photography is very striking when there is a lot of contrast between the shadows and highlights.

If you're struggling create deep shadows in your images, there are a couple of ways you can intentionally intensify them. First, you can try moving closer to your light source; the closer you are to the light source, the more intense the light and shadows will be. However, for dark and moody photos, the light might be too bright (especially on sunny days) and you won't get the look you're after.

Alternatively, you can use a black bounce board (a piece of black card will do!) and place it opposite your light source, next to the object where you want to see a shadow. This will reflect the dark colour of the bounce board back into the shadow and make it appear darker.

5. Edit your photos to enhance the mood

You can create a dark and moody effect in your images during post-production too. Learning how to edit your photos will give you a lot of creative freedom and you'll be able to transform a single image into many different moods.

I mostly use Adobe Lightroom to edit my images, so I will refer to this software in the comments below.

For dark food photography, play with the tone curve to adjust the brightness and darkness of the shadows, midtones and highlights of your image. For me, this is one of the most important panels in Lightroom for creating the look I want for dark and moody images and I often create a soft S-curve as a starting point (see below for an example).

Tools such as the radial filter and brush enable you to select the main subject and make it stand out more by increasing the sharpness and texture, brightness and maybe even saturation or vibrance.

Finally, the colour grading panel is great to experiment with and by adjusting the colours in the highlights, mid-tones and shadows you can create very different looks with a single image using this tool.

Below is an example of a festive, dark and moody image followed by screenshots of the tone curve and colour grading panel so you can see exactly which adjustments I made on this image:

Note: when shooting, avoid creating shadows that are very dark/black because the data of those pixels may be lost and you will not be able to recover and adjust them in editing. Use the histogram to make sure you are not blowing out the blacks and highlights so you retain as much information as possible in the image, giving you most creative control.

Summary

I hope you enjoyed these tips for creating your own dark and mood food photos!

The key things to remember are:

• Backdrops
• Complementing props
• Shaping the light
• Deepening shadows with negative fill
• Editing choices

I'd love to know what your biggest takeaway is from this post - let me know in the comments below! I read every single one 🙂