Food Photo Tips: Blow Up Your Aperture

I am still figuring out my new camera, but one tip that I have read recently (here) is to increase your aperture as much as you can. What that does is opens up the lens to let the light in. Now, what it really does is make those cool photos where you see this little part in focus (corner of a piece of cheesecake) with everything else blurry. I tried it out on this apple.

Notice how the change is blurry?

A more advanced tip would be to set your tri-pod in place and take the same picture with multiple points of focus (i.e. different leaves on a salad) then pull each picture up as a separate layer in Photoshop.  Then erase the parts of each layer so the focused parts all end up on top. This produces a more rounded professional result.

Tags: aperture, camera settings, camera tips, food photography