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What is the best way you guys have learned to take photos of your cookies? Your phone? a camera? How do you decide backgrounds and layouts? I feel like I am not doing my cookies justice, because my photos just look so lackluster...

TIA!

Last edited by Julia M. Usher
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I learned by trial and error, and I take a ton of photos of each cookie project, to be sure I end up with a few that are decent. Even so, my photos aren't always good, as I am no expert. But, I would say: invest in a high-quality digital camera, and manually adjust exposure, etc., or at least don't shoot on fully auto mode. You'll have more control over lighting, colors, focus, etc. this way. Also, I always shoot in raw mode and edit raw images in Photoshop before saving into smaller web-friendly formats. If you do this, you'll be able to edit/adjust images afterwards with much more precision.

I should add that after I bought my camera, I did take a day-long course from our nearby camera store about how to use it. That got me up to speed faster than if I had to rely on the manual alone. I would definitely recommend taking a start-up course like this.

Hi @Celese Marie!

I take pictures of my cookies with my Iphone, no filters, only natural light, trying to avoid shadows. I do have a good camera, but I know that learning how to use it properly would have become a whole new hobby (which I keep procrastinating!) and its auto mode is not working out for me as well as my phone. I am very bad at editing the photos, I just did a couple of time and you could really tell!!!

What I do is looking for the best light during the day. I prepare the staging and set the cookies and take several (“tons” like Julia said!) of pics during the day. I then view them all together at the end of the day and I pick the best time (usually a couple of hours) which may vary, as the position of the sun and the color of its light changes during the year. In Italy the best place was in my kitchen, which was white, and between 1 and 3 p.m.. Wearing a white shirt while taking pics also helps to reflect the natural light on the cookies.

Sometimes it has happened that I couldn’ t take pics during that time, for some reasons, and I regretted to not have learn how to use a real camera properly!!!!

Remember that the cookies are the star of the show, so try to keep the background and the staging very minimal, or pick objects that can tell a story or transmit a feeling or an atmosphere connected with the cookies, while looking at a picture. But the cookies should be the firts thing to catch the attention in the picture, in my opinion.

If you take pics of flat lays try to balance the space filled with cookies with the empty space, or try to keep a certain simmetry and think where you are going to put your watermark later. You could choose a color for the watermark in one of the color of your set. If you don’t like flat lays try to pick an angle with your camera and prop the cookies.

3D cookies are the hardest to photograph in my opinion, because it is hard to keep their real shape and the stage has two dimension, so very often either the cookies or the line of the horizon is slanted and the photo turns out weird.

Ok, after this long novel, my suggestion is to pick those photos of cookies of fellow cookiers that most have catched your attention, and try to understand why they did: the color combination of the set and the background, how the cookies are displayed and the angle of the camera, the light (natural or not), the main lines of perspective, the minimal background (just white or instead dark and full of objects). Not only you will find all of your answer there, but you will be able to develop them in your own style. 

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