Posted on 05/19/2014 8:51:43 AM PDT by upbeat5
Blowtorches, tweezers and glue: These are just a few of the items used to create those mouth-watering restaurant ads.
To make food look as appealing as possible, food stylists and photographers use a range of instruments, good lighting, fresh ingredients and attention to detail. These tricks of the trade help explain why restaurant meals from the drive-thru often look very different than they do in promotional images.
"Nothing is just plopped down and put in the center like it is when you order at a restaurant," said Jean Ann Bybee, owner of Bybee Photography and co-author of a pair of books about food styling.
During shoots, stylists use tweezers, toothpicks, scissors, small blowtorches, paper, tape, glue, pins, paint, oil and glycerin to manipulate and enhance food, Bybee said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
In a related breaking news story, most wives and girl friends do not look like the TV ads when served in Victorias Secret lingerie either…..
TV advertisers have been putting Elmer’s Glue over the breakfast cereal for decades.
Heck, the contents of most canned foods don’t look as appealing as the picture on the can label.
i have gone to Taco Bell and asked them to put as much cheese on my taco as they show in the picture... they do... once i took my taco back to the counter because it was so “not filled.” at that time i was a pretty regular customer... the manager had all three of my tacos done again, and they were nicely filled :)
We don’t eat out as much as we used to because we now live in “Northern Mexico”, otherwise known as the Houston area and I don’t trust the cleanliness of the third world workers. I recently read that photos showing ice cream dishes often use mashed potatoes to represent the ice cream
ha!
Do they mean small propane torches, not small blow torches?
That’s how it’s done, and movie stars get made up before they get photographed, and politicians get a new suit and a haircut, and ads for cars tell you only what they want you to hear and leave out the details that you won’t like, and people make up the attributes that they post on “dating” sites, etc etc.
I look past what they want me to believe and try to find out for myself what things are really like.
They hire models with small hands to hold their burgers for the ads too.
on Kitchen Nightmares with Chef Ramsey, one restaurant used butter on their dessert display... it was on a brownie to look like ice cream... Chef Ramsey found it "effin" unbelievable!"
The lib actor expects an Oscar for his left-coast portrayal of angry conservatives?
Food is one of the tougher things to photograph and actually make look good. With actual fast food off the line its pretty much impossible because it starts out looking like crap.
Ha ha—makes sense, in an advertising sort of way.
One of my all time favorite movies.
You can't go wrong with a blow torch...
I’ve done food styling and photography in the past. It’s heavily idealized. Anything that’s glistening has been sprayed with glycerine. Actual water droplets on fruit, etc. or a hot, juicy-looking steak are not going to stay that way long enough to get the shot. So, something more stable like glycerine is used. There is an entire industry centered around creating unbelievably realistic looking artificial food for this very purpose.
People putting food together in a restaurant are not going to struggle to get that absolutely perfect piece of lettuce for your hamburger, or that vine-ripe, flawless red tomato for your salad. They work with what they’ve got under severe time constraints. Some restaurants are better than others for delivering upon expectations.
Decent places get close but it’s very seldom going to be picture perfect. That takes a whole ‘nother type of focus that you’d only get in a fine dining establishment that strives for presentation and makes enough money on the sale to afford the time and effort to get it that way.
Many years ago I read that steam rising from a hot burger or steak doesn’t photograph well so they blow cigarette smoke onto the food for commercials.
I’ve done food photography. Not as hard as weddings but it’s hard. I doubt you could eat just about anything after its been made to look pretty for the camera. Heck, it took 2+ hours to get a plate of pasta right once.
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there’s a reason that a meal at a three star place, one that DOES look like a photo, can set you back $750 for two before wine.
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