One of the best things about cookery books is the photos of the food, and they can really make the difference between a good a bad book for me. I am much more likely to pick a recipe which has an alluring photo as opposed to one with a bland one or (unforgivably) no photo at all.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is that I have been taking a few photos of food recently, at a food festival (the apples here) and in my own kitchen (the pie above). From my (limited) experience, two tips I would give to anyone looking to take photos of food are: 1. use a short depth of focus to help draw the viewer’s eyes to a particular section of the photo, either by using a very wide aperture or tele-focus zoom lens and 2. use natural light to give a warm feeling to the image. Most photos of food are likely to be taken inside (spare BBQ’s and hog-roasts…), so again a wide aperture lens comes in useful here. I used my Canon EF 50mm f1.8 – a fantastic and stupidly cheap lens. If you have a Canon SLR and don’t have one of these, I would suggest you put it on your list to Santa straight away.