Resources for Foodies and Bloggers

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS
My absolute favourite lens for close up food shots (and portraits of my little girl Mila!). For the longest time, this was the only lens I used – it’s that good. The macrostructure allows for the finer details in your food to really shine through and get your mouth watering! Plus, it’s an incredible lens for taking photos of your loved ones. As it is a prime lens, it doesn’t zoom in or out, so you just need to move your body to get a closer or further away shot. 

Another alternative to this lens is the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 IS (expensive but worth it!), or the Canon 50mm f/1.4L or Canon 50mm f/1.8 STM. I have a lot of friends in food photography who use this lens instead of a 100m macro and love it. If I was going to buy another lens, it would possibly be this one! Personally, I’d go the 1.4L, as a good balance between price and quality.

Note – this is not the greatest travel lens – you have to stand really far away to get things in the picture! For travel, you’ll want a lens with a smaller “100m” number, eg the 24-70mm below, or even the 50mm mentioned above (but the 24-70mm has more flexibility).

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II Lens
This is my newest lens, and it’s the perfect addition to my 100m macro! No longer do I have to run a mile away to get everything in the shot, and it gives us the perfect range of distances for all our video shoots. All our top-down vids are shot with this lens (with the close up “money” shots taken with the 100m macro). It’s also a great one to take away on trips, as it’s got a great focal length for capturing people and scenes, whilst also giving you flexibility that a zoom lens does. For example, you can move it from 70mm (similar to my 100m macro) right down to the 24mm (which is quite far away and just great for landscapes).

82mm X2 UV Filter:
Don’t want specks of food flicking up onto your delicious, expensive camera lens? Make sure you cover them all with a UV filter! They’re super cheap in comparison to your lens and will keep your lens like new (you don’t want food steam etc getting on it, or flecks of food). We use one on each of our lenses, this one here for our 24-70mm lens, and this one here for our 100m macro lens. Get this when you get your lens for sure!

Manfrotto 055XPRO3 Tripod Kit – Aluminium
This is the tripod we use to shoot all our recipe vids! It’s super sturdy and stable – I do not want the aforementioned expensive camera falling in a pile of food! We shorten it up low and pop it on the top of the table in conjunction with our sidearm below, to get all those top-down shots. We also then lengthen it out tall and put the video head on top, to do front on panning images (eg the shots where you see me in the frame too, like a traditional cooking show). Our tripod has a Flat Base Fluid Head attached so we get the widest range of movement possible. If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative, the 290 Xtra is also great. Some friends of mine have it and love. It’s not quite as sturdy, so you’ll just want to make sure you weight it down on the other side to make sure your camera doesn’t end up in your soup 😉

Manfrotto 131D Side Arm:
Our key add-in for all our top-down recipe videos! We hang a bag of almonds/rice on the other side, to balance the weight of the camera body and weight, to be sure it doesn’t topple over. For top-down vids though this is the golden ticket.

Lightroom:

My favourite quick and easy editing tool, to get the lighting and colours in our photos just right! If it’s too dark, or the lighting is slightly blue or yellow, Lightroom is great for editing those issues out. You can also remove shadows, enhances specific colours, crop, and change file size to optimise for our various formats such as your blog, email newsletter, and social media. The final brilliant thing – you can save your favourite settings as “presets”, meaning you can apply them to a whole set of images from one recipe shoot so they match, and also to other recipe shoots too to get a similar look and feel. Both this and Photoshop are available on a free trial, so definitely recommend trying that out. Also, if you’re a student they offer student pricing here (wish I was still a student for this reason!).

Photoshop:
My other favourite editing tool, along with Lightroom! This one can be a bit more overwhelming to begin with, but there are lots of tutorials available online, so you’ll be a pro in no time. Photoshop gives us greater flexibility to add text to our images, so we use this for our giveaways mainly (if you want to check those out, follow us on Facebook here and Instagram here!).

While there are a number of free themes, you will likely benefit more by paying for a theme. We use the theme Out Of The Sandbox which we love. It offers a wide range of customisation features and they provide support if we ever have any issues or need assistance.

We use MailChimp for all of our email marketing and weekly newsletters. Like Shopify, it’s super user-friendly. Their template builder allows you to drag and drop various components to create your email campaign, or they have ready to go templates you can simply fill in. It does have a big price tag (especially as your number of subscribers increase) but it is worth it, especially because of its integration features. Our MailChimp account is integrated with other platforms we use, such as Shopify and SurveyMonkey which allow us to target our message to the people who really care.

Where would we be without Dropbox?! It’s a cloud storage which hosts all our files. It sits on your computer like an ordinary folder but can be accessed by all members of the team! It also saves backups for when you inevitably delete a file you need. If you don’t want to pay for more storage just yet, sign up as many of your friends as possible through your own referral code and you both get more storage!