food photography

Food Porn? Come on, this is a family site!

If you're a food and recipe enthusiast and you're familiar with the many great food blogs and recipe sites online, then I'm pretty sure you're also familiar with the term "food porn".

If not, then food porn is probably not exactly what you might be thinking. After all, this is a family friendly site, so get your thoughts out of the gutter. I think you'll actually find out that food porn is quite wholesome and provides true g-rated entertainment value.

Food porn is a provacative term generally referring to the spectacular presentation of food in advertisements, cooking shows and other visual media including the great proliferation of food blogs on the Internet. The intention of this close-up, glorified presentation of food is to appeal to your eating desire.

For example, the popular food show "Iron Chef" scores high on the scale of spectacular visual presentation of food. The truth of the matter, the show's audience is probably more vicariously entertained watching the food presentations than actually cooking and preparing the recipes and dishes featured on the show.

In the United States, food porn also takes on a slightly negative context when applied to the food industry that some would say goes too far in marketing less than healthy, high fat content, artery clogging food in an irresistable and tantalizing manner.

Across the blogoshpere, food porn, in a mostly "tongue and cheek" manner, refers to the myriad of food blogs that feature spectacular photographs of food. Spectular food photography has most definitely become part of the pop food culture today. If you're interested in food, it's good fun to gaze at the food photography that people are turning out every day.

You can have a lot of fun creating and composing your recipes and cookbooks at Family Recipe Central. One of the features that our users appreciate is the ability to embed and include photographs in your recipes and cookbook pages. And, sooner or later, this introduces you to the challenge for "Food Photography".

When I became interested in publishing my own recipes and the creative process of putting a family cookbook together, it didn't take long to realize that shooting pictures of food is not as easy as it looks. Or maybe it's not so much that it looks easy. But how often have you compared your own food pictures to the stunning food photography we often see in cookbooks or on some of the food websites around the Internet, and scratched your head with the question, "how do they take such great food photos"?