Expert guidance for your phone photos. Cut through the confusion, unlock your phone’s potential, and take creative, standout photos that tell stories and make a difference. Drawn from Gabrielle’s 17+ years of professional photography experience, each weekly e-mail is filled with practical tips and none of the complex technical jargon.
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Week 26: Watch This Salad Get an Upgrade in 1, 2, 3.
Published about 1 year ago • 2 min read
LEVEL UP YOUR PHONE PHOTOGRAPHY
WITH GABRIELLE TOUCHETTE
•••
Welcome to Week 26 of 2025!
In today's e-mail, you'll get:
TIP OF THE WEEK: The Top 3 Food Photography Tips That Professionals Use
PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Going 2D to 3D With Light & Dark Tones
RESOURCES YOU MIGHT LIKE: What the World's Biggest Digital Camera Is Looking At
TIP OF THE WEEK
How the Pros Do Food Photography
Attention all you food lovers! Today I'm sharing my go-to techniques for better food photos. Here are my 3 favourite quick tips for making dishes look more appetizing:
Instead of shooting wide angle (with the 1x lens), zoom in a bit and focus on a piece of food or interesting texture that you can place at the forefront of your photo.
In the photo on the left, I used the 1x lens on my iPhone and shot from above. This made the dish look wide angle and distorted. I was also too close to the food, and my phone was not able to focus properly. In the photo on the right, I lowered my angle, zoomed in a bit and focused on an interesting clump of tomatoes to make it my "main" feature. This created a much more flattering composition, making this photo much more appetizing.
2. Place your food in soft, indirect light and have the light illuminate your dish from the back. This is a classic food photography lighting tip - it’s used a lot in food magazines and cookbook photography.
3. Edit your photo in Lightroom. Increase the brightness, the saturation, the contrast and the sharpening. Remember that a photo properly captured will be easier to edit, so do a lot of the work from #1 and #2 first, so that editing in Lightroom gets you awesome results.
PHOTO OF THE WEEK
Using Light and Dark Variations
This photo may not look like much, but I wanted to show it as an opportunity to share how I develop my eye to see interesting things in the mundane.
Notice how some leaves are brighter and more in the foreground?
Initially, seeing this variation of bright on dark is what caught my eye and inspired me to take this photo.
Bright areas of our image tend to pop out more than darker areas, and this variation in tone is what creates the illusion of depth. Noticing this type of light variation and including it in our photos helps them look less flat (photos are 2D!). It helps them look more 3D.
So next time you see light and dark variations, prioritize using it in your compositions. It'll make your photos pop.
RESOURCES YOU MIGHT LIKE
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time
Today I'm taking you to the opposite end of digital photography, away from tiny phone cameras and all the way to the world's biggest digital camera: the Vera Rubin Telescope.
At a whopping 3.2 gigapixel size, it can include a LOT in a photo.
Hi I'm Gabrielle! I run a full time photography business in Winnipeg, specializing in portrait and commercial photography. This newsletter started with my passion for helping everyday people realize their full photography potential. With a bit of technical and creative help, you too can take better photos with the phone camera you already have.
Expert guidance for your phone photos. Cut through the confusion, unlock your phone’s potential, and take creative, standout photos that tell stories and make a difference. Drawn from Gabrielle’s 17+ years of professional photography experience, each weekly e-mail is filled with practical tips and none of the complex technical jargon.
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