1. Do not leave anything in the oven if you leave the house to use Photoshop.
2. Do use photoshop’s built in filters quite heavily, as this is a new and novel way to approach photography and everyone loves the filters.
3. If you are using photoshop during a thunderstorm, it is advisable to hear a tinfoil helmet.

That being said, there are a few tips and guidelines that can be shared.

1. Blindfold the food.
Food has many dimensions, but the most important organ we have is our brain. When one sense is hindered, our other senses — via the brain — clamor to compensate. For example, a deaf person has increased sensory awareness — sight, smell, touch, and vibrations. Blindfolding your food increases her sensory awareness. She doesn’t know where you are or what you are going to do next. This creates anticipation.

2. Massage.
Sensual touch is one of the most highly relaxing and sexy things you can do for your partner, which is why it makes it onto our food list. Our bodies are almost without exception tense in some area, if not many areas. This hinders our energy flow — including food. Imagine a car that has a clogged fuel filter: the fuel (our energy) can’t get to where it needs to go quickly and smoothly, and the car performs inefficiently and ineffectively.

3. Play a game.
Get a pack of cards and play strip poker for better food photography. It may seem like something you would have done when you were in high school, but adult strip poker is a good way to get food photographed. Once you are both naked (or nearly naked), you can start on the really fun part: A loss means the other person gets to choose what action is performed on them by the loser. Time limits like one minute on said action means that it is a prolonged game of seduction, which by the end will have you both clamoring to be both the winner and the loser. There are many other games you can play “strip” to, as long as there is regular winner and loser to reward and punish respectively.

So to sum up: use lighting, don’t let the assistant eat the food before it is photographed, and stay away from prisons.

Bon appetit and happy shooting!

Seriously, though. There is a real science to marketing yourself as a photographer. What you want to do is to adopt a great big phony personality and then never leave anyone who hires photographers alone. This will get even the biggest hack noticed around town. If you can, just bluster right past any secretaries that might be in your way. Throw your book at the art director. Force feed the art director your ipad. Do what it takes, damn you! Do it now!

Don't misfire with your marketing.

But so what else? What else can you do? Well, not much. If they just won’t smile sometimes they are doing a little kind of power trip with you. It’s all like “I’m so annoyed at having my picture taken that I refuse to make the tiniest effort to fake a smile, or to get myself to think happy thoughts, or use the Method” or whatever damned thing that people use to get themselves to look really happy. Often I threaten to tell jokes. Threatening to tell jokes can get people to smile, but then sometimes they call your bluff and make me actually tell the joke. I’ve got a duck joke which is pretty good, and simple. It’s not the same as the quacking thing I talked about earlier, it’s the one about the guy going to the doctor with a duck on his head. I also have some photographer jokes and a dirty joke about Bill Clinton. But if you finally have to resort to telling jokes to get a smile, that is, if your stockpile of goofy expressions and your ability to quack have all run out, you are maybe almost in trouble. You better hope that joke works, or you are screwed. Good luck.

After some research, however, mainly here, Tadsen Photography discovered that centipedes bite and are kind of disgusting and so we decided to kill the thing anyway.

Ok, now that you have your lights you’ll want to know where to put them for maximum photographic-style output. For portrait lighting I’ve developed a fairly simple strategy which can be related by this formula:

Where “K” is the first light, “R” is the second light and the rest of it should be self-explanatory. If you need a hair light, just use the square root of gamma and take the modified result.

Now product and food lighting require different strategies altogether. If you are very close to the subject, use this:

MicroB should be your result, where pi and R are the position of the product and the strobe with respect to gamma.

I feel a little funny giving away my secrets like this, but with so many years of accumulated experience it seems to me like I almost have a duty to share what I’ve learned with the incoming generation of shutterbugs.

Keep on clicking!

Where to put the lights? How to adjust them? It just doesn’t matter anymore, because you can do this all in Photoshop. You don’t even need the lights at all, actually. Newer cameras can literally “see in the dark” so just take several exposures (the instructions for doing this should be in the manual, though not in English) then tell Photoshop which direction you’d like the light to be coming from. Heck, you can even tell photoshop what you want in the photo. A frog? Your Mother-in-law? Photoshop can provide. By seamlessly integrating with stock photography agencies, Photoshop is able to create your ideal photo. Just make sure you get a really expensive camera.

Once you are all set up and running it’s time to create some images. Mostly you should just copy the images that you really like, like things you’ve seen in magazines. These images aren’t real anyway, and so it’s good practice to try to duplicate them. Most of the work can be done in your sleep. While sleeping, dream about what you’d like in the image, aside from the subject matter, then phone up Photoshop from a Photobooth, and you are ready to go. Printing can be done online or offline, depending upon your ISP and that is all there is to it.

If you have any more questions, and I doubt you will, you can just go back to sleep. It’s the easiest thing. I love you all.