Food photography

for AleitApteit cookbook

We had the honour to be part of the team of this incredible project. This cookbook was definitely not the typical food photography cookbook that you would find in a bookstore with the same old popular recipes that almost every Afrikaans cookbook has. No, this was more of a lifestyle type of cookbook written by the one and only Aleit Swanepoel. Every chapter of this had different tables with dishes from that chapter. Individual shots were taken of all the different foods as well. We build different sets for each chapter of the cookbook. Each chapter had a different set table. For decor elements, we used some furniture and decor pieces from Aleits personal collection in his house as well furniture supplied by a|CREATE.

We did the shoot of the entire cookbook in about three days in total. There was definitely no time for us to do hours of styling the food in the way that food photographers usually do. Our team used the experience that we had as photographers to incorporate it into this shoot. We used the ambient light as well as the help from the flash to create the look and feel of the photography of this book. We mostly relied on the flash for lighting but the ambient light was of great help. You can see that there is some motion in some of the pictures, which is not very common for food photography shoots. Which makes this shoot unique as well. Food Photography pictures are mostly still images.

As always we had the absolute pleasure to have the great help of the Aleit Academy students assisting us with this shoot. Although don’t really do food photography at all, we definitely enjoyed working on this project with this extremely talented team.

Furniture: https://www.acreate.co.za

Aleit Academy: https://www.aleitacademy.co.za