Rainbow food

Make mouth-watering images by shooting a rainbow of fruit

If shooting still-life setups makes you lick your lips, you’ll definitely want to have a go at our delicious food photography photo project! For this project, we decided to capture a rainbow of colours using fresh fruit.

The beauty of this project is you don’t need loads of fancy kit. We used a Olympus OM-D E-M1 with a 12-40mm lens, which is equivalent to a 24-80mm lens on a full-frame SLR. To light our fruit, we simply placed it on a white highchair tray and positioned it by the window. If you don’t have a highchair, a white plate will do the job. We used a reflector to bounce the light back into the shadows, giving the end result a nice lift. When it comes to planning, you’ll want to make a list of your fruit before you head to the shop. It’s easy to get side-tracked when you have lots of options!

We simply took the colours of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) and assigned a different fruit to each. For red we selected strawberries; oranges for orange; bananas for yellow; kiwifruit for green; blueberries for blue; red grapes for indigo (this is where it got tricker); and passionfruit for violet. You could also use salad or vegetables, depending on the time of year you’re shooting and the results you’re after.