If you want to be a foodblogger, don’t let anything stop you.
If you had told me back in 2016 that I would be a foodblogger and actually be asked by brands to take pictures five years later, I would have laughed. I had hardly figured out how to use facebook. I thought I was hopeless with computers and technical stuff. And I had zero interest in photography.
But I knew a lot about vegan food and traveling as a vegan, and one morning, I woke up and decided to share my knowledge in a blog and videos. Even though I didn’t know the first thing about making videos either, I went for it like a pitbull.
Covering the basics
It still amazes me how much you can learn if you really want to, even while working full time. I signed up for a weekend blogging basics class here in Berlin back then, where I learned about domains, hosting, wordpress, themes, mailing lists, affiliate marketing, ads, canva, pinterest and other basics. I highly recommend looking into these things and getting an overview before you start, and also looking at a lot of other blogs to see what they do, so you can figure out what it is that you want. That will save you lots of time and money.
Food Blogger Pro is a platform that will help you with this. I also learned a lot from Create and Go.
Foodblogger equipment
What you need really depends on what exactly you want to do. Until you figured that out, I’d say with the quality of today’s smartphones, start with that and an instagram account. I used my one instagram link to take people to my blog right away by creating a site for my Instagram bio.
Test the foodblogger-waters a little to figure out what you want to do, who your target group is, what they are looking for and what you actually need to create that. Then you can set up a proper blog for your content to live (because social media accounts are never really yours) and buy good equipment.
The first thing I invested in when I knew I was going to be a foodblogger no matter what, was a proper camera. I went for a Canon EOS 700D, which was recommended for beginners back then, but meanwhile I treated myself to an EOS 6D Mark II*, which is way more fun and used by many food photographers. I also got this 50 mm lens* and this 100 mm macro lens*, which are just amazing for food photography. I bought the macro lens second hand as it’s not cheap.
I now also use this tripod* and this c-stand for overhead shots*. I shoot tethered to my computer with a tether cable*.
In the beginning I edited my videos with Imovie, which comes for free with a Mac, and Mac stores offer free classes on how to work with it, that was of course super helpful. Last year I moved on to Adobe premier rush, which is about 10 euro/ month, but has way more functions and – and that was the main reason I got it – you can edit your videos in the right format for instagram.
I use this external hard drive* to save all my material. This is so important. You can’t have everything cluttering your computer, but you never know if, no: when you’ll need something again.
Food Photography
This is such a big subject that I now wrote a separate blogpost about how I went from A to B …
… and C (2023):
Continue reading here: How to take your food photography to the next level.
