John Gholson, Director of Creative Development at Rocksauce | APPS | 04.10.2012 @ 9:33 am
The most common joke yesterday, in the wake of Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram, was that the social network had paid an extraordinary amount of money for people’s sepia-toned photos of their dinner. First of all, Instagram doesn’t even have a straight-up sepia filter, and, secondly, anybody who’s serious about using an app to take a picture of their dinner is using something better than Instagram for that purpose. Try Picdish, Evernote Food, and my personal favorite, Foodspotting, and you’ll see that there are apps specifically designed to capture memorable meals.
I tend to use Evernote Food for meals cooked at home and Foodspotting for restaurant outings. Evernote Food has limited social aspects, but seems well-designed for creating your own library of recipes and attaching those to photos of the finished product. Foodspotting, on the other hand, is a social network designed around food and sharing great meals from restaurants with others. You can attach a photo of your meal to the location, so that others can use the app to see what kind of food is being served up. You can mark food from user photos as “tried,” “loved,” or “want” so that you can offer recommendations, or earmark a beautiful plate of chicken and waffles that you want to remember for later.
The only real downside to an app like Foodspotting is the crowd-sourced photographic content. I realize not everyone is a professional food photographer — I’m not either — but a poorly photographed meal, no matter how delicious it may have actually been, can look unappetizing as a cluster of out-of-focus blobs, washed out with the white light of the flash. You want to capture an image that makes the mouth water, if you’re posting the pic as a selling point for that restaurant.
Here are some quick tips that can help you get the best from your food photos.