Food Blogger Entrepreneurs

Hey guys, it’s Dani. And today is day 30 of the food styling challenge. We made it!

Today we’re talking all about slow cookers. So let’s jump in with our best tips and tricks.

Tip number one is add fresh vegetables. Just because your slow cooker dish looks kind of all cooked and mushy at the end doesn’t mean that that’s how you have to style it. It’s totally okay to take some extra vegetables, blanch them, and add them into your dish if you’re trying to make it look photo-worthy. People want it to look delicious. They understand that it’s not necessarily gonna come out looking just like yours. So blanch some veggies and then once you add them into the dish, you’re gonna wanna take a little paint brush. And take that paint brush in and just brush on some of the sauce that you’ve already made in the slow cooker. That’s gonna make them look like they blend in a little bit better while still giving you those beautiful pops of color. Tip number two is use a slow cooker liner. These are amazing. If you’re wanting to take a shot actually in your slow cooker and show that for your blog post, you’re gonna wanna make sure that your slow cooker is super clean. Otherwise it looks really gross and messy. But they inherently get dirty. So use a slow cooker liner, then pull the whole thing out once you’re done and pour it back into the slow cooker. And then take your pictures. Way easier than sitting there and scrubbing baked on food off of your slow cooker every time. Tip number three is make it interesting. Add some cilantro, add some kind of color to your dish somewhere in there, even if it doesn’t necessarily look that way, add a little bit of pop of color in there. It really does need it. The other thing you can do to add interest to a slow cooker shot is to use a ladle. You can scoop out the food and still have it in the same frame. Pull that ladle right up to the front of your camera and get a close up there, while still capturing the fact that it was in a slow cooker. And finally, tip number four, is just take it out of the slow cooker. If it looks awful in the slow cooker don’t feel like you have to style it in the slow cooker just because its’ a slow cooker dish. It’s very easy to take it out and style it just like any other dish that you would do. You can add all kinds of different colorful toppings and if you wanted to, you could even just toss the slow cooker in the background so that you can really communicate to your readers that it is indeed a slow cooker dish. Thanks for watching guys. I hope that was helpful. If it was, leave me a comment below and let me know that. And also let me know what you’d like to see in our future episodes. Make sure that you subscribe and click the link below so that you can get instant updates when we go live and when new trainings go live. As a welcome gift, we’ll also send you one of our best freebies. So make sure you don’t miss it. Until next time guys, see ya later.

– Hi guys, thanks for tuning in. Welcome to day 29 of the Food Styling Challenge. I’m Dani, and today we are talking all about ice cream. So let’s go ahead and jump in. Our first tip for ice cream is make room in your freezer. I cannot tell you how many times we have started an ice cream shoot and realized that we haven’t cleared enough space in the freezer to do all of this. You are gonna need some extra space in your freezer. You may find if you’re shooting a lot of ice cream at home and you’re doing a lot of summer posts with ice cream in them, that it’s really great to have an extra freezer. We have an extra stand up freezer and it makes shooting ice cream so much easier. Tip number two is freeze a cookie sheet. You wanna freeze a cookie sheet. We’re gonna line the cookie sheet with wax paper after we’re done freezing it. But for now, just pop it into the freezer, get it freezing so that when you pull your ice cream out you can also pull that frozen cookie sheet out with it. Tip number three is pre-scoop your ice cream. This is a really key component, because working with ice cream is very time sensitive and it can be very difficult to go through the whole process of scooping, getting on there, getting into the set before you have, before you realize that it’s just completely fallen apart and melted. So, what you’re gonna wanna do is pull your ice cream out from the freezer, pull your cookie sheet out from the freezer, and start pre-scooping those scoops onto that wax paper. Now when you do this, you wanna work very quickly. It may be better to have several small cookie sheets if you’re gonna be very particular about your scoops. So get them on there as quickly as possible and get them back into the freezer. Our next tip is use a stand in. So I don’t know if you can see this but this is basically a wadded up paper towel. So we’ve stuffed this inside of the ice cream cone, and as we start to work on our set, we’re gonna use this as our stand in. This is going to allow us to compose our complete set for our ice cream before we start pulling it out of the freezer. This is gonna give your camera something to adjust to really well. So if you have a different colored ice cream that’s dramatically different, you can use a little bit of a different color. You can use tissue paper in here with different colors if you wanna get that nitpicky, otherwise, you can just use paper towels and get them on the set like that. Our last tip for today are freeze in glasses. If you are using ice cream cones and you want to, you can freeze the entire thing. And use a glass that’s a very close size to your ice cream cone to hold them up in the freezer. This is a very nice trick that keeps them from being a mess and makes it to where it’s really quick, grab and go to get a bunch of them out of there. Now, when you’re working with ice cream, make sure you make extras, ’cause it does melt so fast. You can appreciate the mess in there, but you always wanna have back ups, especially if you’re working with kids and ice cream. It’s a lot easier to make up a bunch more cones then you’re gonna need, or scoops than you’re gonna need and to start using them one after another in rapid fire succession. I hope that you found this video helpful. If you did, leave me a comment below and let me know. Let me know if there’s any other things that you’d like to hear us talk about. And if you haven’t already, make sure that you subscribe. There is a link in the description box that allows you to subscribe for instant updates, which will let you know when any of our next time sensitive do go live. Make sure that you get in there. Make sure that you come and check out the trainings before they expire. And until next time, guys, see you later.

– Hey guys, it’s Dani, and welcome to day 28 of the Food Styling Challenge. Today we are talking all about meats. How to keep them looking fresh, how to keep them looking appetizing and all of our best tips and tricks. Trick number one is don’t over cook them. This is so important when you’re working with meats, not to overcook them. Now, there are a lot of dishes like whole turkeys or whole chickens where they’re not even completely cooked all the way through. And there’s a big reason for that, if you have to cut into them and they’re going to be looking dry and they’re gonna sit on the set for awhile, you wanna err on the side of under cooking them verses over cooking them. Also, keep in mind that just like you’re told to rest the meat before it comes out and gets eaten, you also are gonna do that same thing when you’re doing food styling. So the longer it sits on set, the longer it’s going to cook. So make sure that you’re not over cooking it. You wanna keep it right in the middle range ’til where it’s still looking really nice on the outside before you pull it. Tip number two is keep them oiled up You want to use either cooking oil spray, or use olive oil with a paint brush and keep it brushed. Now, right before you shoot that meat, you’re gonna wanna go ahead and brush it again with a nice little glaze there of the oil. That’s gonna give you all that beautiful sheen and really keep it looking nice and juicy. What a lot of people don’t know is that you can also keep most meats stored in oil. So if you need to prep them beforehand, you can go ahead and do that and then just store them in a little container of oil and they’ll stay looking very fresh. A lot of meats can be refreshed also by dunking them into hot oil. So, things like bacon, for example. If it sits on the set and it starts getting really dry and kind of mushy looking, if you warm up a little bit of oil in a container and just dunk them in really fast in there, they’ll get all that beautiful sheen and start to really relax and look really nice. Tip number three is to color it up. Now, what most people who aren’t food stylists don’t know is that most of the food that you see for camera, it’s actually had its colored manipulated in some way. Now the most common and easiest ones to use for this are a Kitchen Bouquet, which is a browning seasoning sauce, it’s completely edible. And maraschino cherry juice. So, these are very common, you can find them at any grocery store and they’re going to help you darken up the look of whatever meat it is that you’re cooking and in the case of beef, the maraschino juice is gonna help bring back some of that red color into the meat. I hope you enjoyed this video, friends. If you did, let me know, leave me a comment below and also let me know if there’s other things that you’d like to see covered. If you like this content, make sure that you subscribe and click the link below in the description box and that will take you in for instant updates so you will never miss another training and you get one of our amazing downloadable worksheets, all for free. I can’t wait to see you again tomorrow. We’ll see ya later, bye!

– Hi guys, it’s Dani and today is day 27 of the food styling challenge. This morning we are talking all about styling flat foods. So that includes things like flat cookies, quesadillas, flat sandwiches, anything like that. Tip number one is to stack them. Now stacking works very very well for flat foods. You can stack cookies, you can stack donuts, you can stack quesadillas. The key to this is making sure you have enough of them. If you don’t make enough of them it’s going to be very difficult to pull this off. So make sure that you cook extra when you’re working with flat foods. Tip number two is to do a flat lay. Now a flt lay is a very common shot that happens a lot on Instagram. It’s where you’re going directly overhead and gonna put a lot of different things in your frame. It’s gonna work really well for flat foods because they don’t have a lot of depth there to work with so they tend to work really well for this. The big thing with this is to make sure that you’re showing a little bit of emotion. So don’t just leave all of your cookies in one spot. Make sure you take a couple out of the flat lay, break them up, put some crumbles through there. If you have a couple quesadillas, make sure you’re fanning them to give them some texture still even though you’re coming straight overhead. Tip number three is to dip them. Things that are flat tend to dip very well. So think about dipping into a cookie, a cookie into a glass of milk. Think about dipping quesadillas into different kinds of dips. All of these work very, very well. Is overstuff them. If you have something that’s very flat, maybe like a panini and you think about it and it’s only this thick, and it’s really gonna have a lot of struggles with your styling, overstuff it. Don’t be afraid to add more ingredients in there than maybe you really would even when you were eating it. The point of this is not to necessarily show the perfect way to make it. The point of it is to make it look appetizing. So add a few extra tablespoons of pesto in there. Add more cheese, use thicker bread. Do as many things as you can to help give it a little bit more depth there to work with versus smashing it completely flat. This works very well with quesadillas. Try using gordita quesadillas instead of traditional tortillas. This gives you again a little bit more thickness there and just make sure that you’re putting lots of extra cheese in there, lots of extra ingredients in there to really help give you a lot more height there to work with. My last tip is to use models. Flat foods work very well in lifestyle shots. So if you can get cute little hands in there, if you can get your hands in there, or out at a campfire, or anything to bring more emotion to the shot. If you can’t get it from the food, make the rest of your scene work for you. I hope that that was helpful and that you enjoyed this video. If you did, leave me a comment below and let me know. Also, be sure to subscribe, follow our Facebook page, and make sure to hit the link below that will take you to our subscription and will get you one of our best freebies. I can’t wait to see you again next time, bye.

– Hi guys, it’s Danny, and welcome to day 26 of the food styling challenge. Today we are talking all about how to style brown foods like gravy. So let’s go ahead and jump in with all the tips and tricks. Tip number one is don’t smother your foods. Now this might seem kind of counterintuitive if you’re working with something like gravy, which you’re supposed to smother things with, right? But, the key to doing this for food styling is that we don’t want to completely drape the food with the gravy or the sauce. This is really important because your viewer can’t really see what’s underneath there. It just kind of looks like a lump, so you want to use your gravy strategically. So make sure that you’re still showing part of the biscuit or part of the steak or anything underneath there. And you’re just giving them the idea that there’s gravy in there. Tip number two is add interest. If your gravy is just a straight brown gravy, try adding black pepper to it. Try adding a few other ingredients into the gravy to make it more interesting. You can add sausage into it, that’s another really great one. If you can add bacon to it, if you can add you know maybe some grilled peppers to it. Those are arr really great options to help bring a little bit more interest right on there. The other thing is to consider your recipe. Could you add maybe a runny egg to the side? Or add some other element into it to bring a little bit more interest to it. Tip number three is add pops of color. Now there are some dishes where you just can’t get away from the fact they’re just brown, and they’re just boring but sure are delicious. So in that case, use garnishes of color throughout. Add pops of color in your napkin. Add extra things on the plate. Add maybe you know some charred tomatoes on there with it. Add some different colors in the background of your propping. And then the biggest one is make sure that you’re garnishing with a green garnish, usually going to be parsley in a situation of gravies. Because that is just such a huge component of really adding that interest in there. The other thing you want to make sure is that you do a nice dusting of coarse black pepper on there. That’s really going to bring a lot more texture there, and add a lot more interest. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It is a simple comfort food dish, but make sure you add a little bit of interest throughout there. Now, you’re working with things like gravy over mashed potatoes, that can also be a great option because you can really add a lot of interest there in terms of adding swirls to your potatoes, and really getting in a lot of texture added in there. So, find the interest in the story, if its texture, then go with texture. If it’s more color, add more pops of color throughout, and always think about as you’re developing your recipe, “what is it that’s really going to make this look delicious to the viewer?” Thanks for watching guys, I hope this was helpful to you. If it was, leave me a comment below and let me know. Also, be sure that you subscribe, like our Facebook page, and make sure that you click on the messenger link below in the comment area so that you can get hooked into our instant alerts, And get one of our best freebies. I’ll see you next time, bye! [Upbeat Music]

– Hey guys, it’s Dani. Today it’s day 25 of the food styling challenge. We are talking all about how to get that beautiful, wet, dewy, condensation look on your produce. Whether this is a basket of strawberries, whether it’s a salad. We’re gonna dive in and show you all the tips and tricks to get this done. Tip number one: Make your spray. The first thing that you need to do to achieve this look is to make up your spray. Now, you can do this with glycerin, which is my preference, but you can also make a pretty good version of this with Karo syrup, which you can find at any grocery store. You’re gonna mix these at a one-to-one ratio. Tip number two: Use a spray bottle. So, you want to find a little spray bottle. You can reuse any kind of spray bottles that you find in your housewares stuff, that you find in the beauty product supply space. I’m always running around finding different little bottles to use. Each bottle is gonna have its own unique spray pattern, so make sure that you play with a bunch of them and you’ll eventually find the one that you love the best. Another secret place to find them is that they often have them at health food stores with like the aromatherapy and things like that. Where they have all kinds of, like make your own mixes. Now, you’ll want to use the spray bottle on things where you want to cover the entire surface of this. Now this works really well for things like baskets of strawberries or salads. Which, that’s a great look and there’s lots of times where that’s applicable, but what about those other times? What about when, say you have a sandwich and if you come in here with a spray, you’re gonna spray over that whole sandwich, it’s gonna get your bread all soggy, it’s gonna get glycerin on your meat. Eh, it’s not really such a good look. So for that, we have tip number three. Tip number three is: Use a needle applicator or a toothpick. Either one of these work. A toothpick is a little bit more labor intensive to use because you do have to go back for each drop. So my preference is to use what’s called a needle applicator. Now, this is basically a squeeze bottle and it has a little teeny needle on the end of it. These are often used by crafters. So, you can usually find them at places like Jo-Ann’s or on Amazon. We will link to this in the footer of this so you can definitely just order them that way. And this is amazing because you can come in and you can apply this right where you want it. So put it on the leaves of your lettuce, put it on the outside of the tomato, on the outside of your sandwich. Anything where you need just a little bit more control. Now do you use a lot of glycerin sprays for like cocktails and things like that, you can also go in and clean up things with this and you can make little runs with it. It’s a very, very helpful tool to have in your toolkit. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked this, please let me know in the comments below and also let me know if you have anything else that you’d like to cover or anything that you’re wondering like, how do they do that? I’m happy to help share my tips and tricks here. Also, if you haven’t already, make sure you like our Facebook page and click into the link in the description box. That will get you linked into instant updates to know when we go live and when the next free trainings are and we’ll give you one of our best bonuses ever. I can’t wait to see you guys again. We’ll see you tomorrow. Bye!

– Hi guys, and welcome to day 24 of the food styling challenge. Today we are talking all about how to make perfect camera ready bacon. Bacon can be one of the most delicious things to have in your food photography, but it can also be a little bit finicky. So today we’re gonna jump in to some tips on how to work with it really well. Tip number one is use a wire rack. Using a wire rack makes it really easy to help give you curves and movement in the bacon as you cook it. It also let’s you cook it in the oven versus cooking it on a pan. That’s gonna give you a lot more control and as it’s not sitting in the bacon grease, it’s gonna give it the ability to cook with a lot more consistency. The best way to do this is pop it into 325 degree oven and cook it for about 20 to 30 minutes depending on the type of bacon until it looks nice and cooked and crispy. Tip number two is to use a microwave safe bacon tray. You want to make sure you find one of these that has nice even deep grooves in it. Some of them are spread out too far or the grooves are too far apart. So you want something that’s really gonna give you a nice wave to your bacon. And then you can just cook it in the microwave which is pretty convenient if you have a lot of other things going in your oven. Tip number three, use oil. If your bacon starts to dry out on set, it can be refreshed very easily with a little brushing of olive oil or you can dunk it into an entire vat of hot oil or the bacon grease that’s already sitting in the pan. And you can use that to really revive it and make it look fresh again. I hope you enjoyed this video. Please let me know in the comments below if you did. Tag a friend if you enjoyed it and let them know to come check out our channel. And also, be sure to subscribe. Click the link in the description box below to subscribe for instant updates when we go live and all the new trainings. And, we’ll hook you up with one of our best freebies. Until next time guys, see ya later.

– Hey guys, it’s Dani, and welcome to Day 23 of the Food Styling Challenge. Today we are talking all about how to make your salads stay picture perfect for a good long time. Working with salads can be an incredible experience. They’re so beautiful and they’re so vibrant in color, that they really are a beautiful thing to photograph but they don’t come without their challenges. And so, some of the tips and tricks we have for you today are going to help you counter some of those difficulties in working with this kind of product. Tip number one is to start with a mashed potato base. I know we’ve talked about mashed potatoes before, but mashed potatoes shine when it comes to salads. Salads really start to deflate as they get piled up on top of each other. So if you can work with a base that makes it to where you don’t have to have as much salad covering each other, that can really help it stay fresh and vibrant in there. And it helps it because you’re able to cover it with water, water-soaked paper towels, and you’re gonna reach most of it to keep it cool. Whereas if it’s all underneath in the bottom of your salad bowl, it’s gonna start to deteriorate and start to press and your salad is going to start to sink down into the bowl. And eventually it’s gonna look like you don’t have enough salad in your bowl. Tip number two is use a potato. Now this might seem like kind of a weird tip but if you don’t use a mashed potato base and you just have a couple things that you’re struggling with on your salad, maybe it’s in a really shallow bowl. And your tomatoes keep rolling inside of your salad greens. Use a little teeny piece of potato and shove a toothpick into it, just like we do in some of our other videos for soups and things like that. This allows you to have a base for that tomato to stick onto. And it kind of allows it to float in suspension without crushing the greens. Tip number three is shock your greens. When you get your greens home from the grocery store. What you’re going to wanna do is throw them into an ice bath. Sounds pretty violent but it’s really not. All you need to do is add a couple cups of ice into your sink or into a bucket of nice cold water and then toss all your greens in there and let them soak. Better yet, go ahead and cut them and do that. That way they can really start to absorb that water. Now one trick about cutting your greens when you’re going to put them into there, is to cut them under the water versus on your countertop with a cutting board. And the reason for doing that is that when they’re cut they are gonna suck in whatever it is that they’re exposed to. So if you cut them in air, they’re gonna suck in air. If you cut them in water, they’re gonna suck in water. Now this is something that was proven out in the floral industry, of all things. And so if you do this with your greens, it helps them just perk up just a little bit faster and really get all that good water in there to where they look really bright and vibrant. Our last tip for today is make sure you dress your greens. Now the important thing when you’re dressing your greens is to do it in stages. Greens will start to deteriorate as soon as you start working with any kind of liquid on top of them. That includes salad dressing, that includes putting glycerine drops on it. Anything like that is gonna start breaking it down. So what you wanna do is style everything dry. And then when you’re ready to shoot, you can start spritzing it with either glycerine water combo, if you want some water bead droplets on there. Or you can use some little pipettes and add in salad dressing in just a few places. Now most of the time if you’re doing this, and you’re gonna do a pour shot. You don’t really need to cover it in salad dressing. You just need the appearance of it looking wet. So you can use something like glycerine or even just water in a spray bottle to just give it a little bit of moisture so it doesn’t look dry. And then just start pouring your salad dressing on as you’re shooting. Thanks for watching, guys. I hope that you found that helpful. If you did, leave me a comment below and let me know. Tag a friend who might need this information and be sure to subscribe. Click the link in the description box to subscribe for instant updates and you’ll get one of our best freebies. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you soon. Bye.

– Hey guys, and welcome to day 22 of the food styling challenge, I’m Dani, and today we’re talking all about steam shots. So let’s jump in with all the tips and tricks. Steam is one of the most exciting things in food photography. It really gives you a ton of emotion and a lot of emphasis around how comforting and warm the dish is. But, it can be really tricky to work with. So today we’re gonna share our top tips on how to capture that perfect steam look. Just cook it. A lot of times the easiest way to get steam is just to shoot things as soon as they come out of the oven. So if you’ve already got natural steam working for you, work with it. Two are tampons! Who knew you’d be using tampons in food photography. Tampons are an amazing quick trick that works really well with certain foods because you can heat them up really well, and hide them very, very easily. There’s no cords or anything attached to them. In a nutshell, you sunk the tampon, heat it up in the microwave until it’s piping, steaming hot. And then tuck it right behind whatever food it is that you’re trying to get the steam coming up behind. Use a steamer. A handheld steamer can be a perfect way to get steam in your shots. Be careful, you can get burned and it can damage your cameras. So watch yourself that you don’t put this into your actual camera. Now the difficult thing about this is this can wilt all of your food. If you put this up against something that has lettuce on it, something that has any kind of green garnish on it, it will immediately wilt that. So it can be used with discretion, in certain situations. Incense. Incense is an easy way to get some smoke into your scene. Now it can look a little bit more fake than other steam options, so keep that in mind. But in some situations it looks really good. Thanks for joining us today, guys. I hope that you enjoyed this. If you did, definitely leave us a comment below. Let us know if there’s anything else you’d like to see us cover in future shows. And be sure to subscribe. Click the link in the description box to do so, and that will get you instant updates when new trainings come out. And you’ll score one of our best freebies. I hope to see you guys next time. See ya later!

– Hi guys and welcome to day 21 of the food styling challenge. This morning we are talking all about how to make those pesty drinks that go flat, bubbly again. The first trick that I have to share with you today is to use a wooden chopstick. A lot of drinks can be reinvigorated by stirring them with a wooden chopstick. This helps activate the bubbles again and gets things moving. The next trick that I have for you are alka-seltzer tabs. These tabs work really well to reinvigorate a drink and get things bubbling again. Be aware, you can only use them once or twice before you start getting some cloudy muck in there. But my all time favorite way to do this, I have to tell you is right here. This is canned air. So this is the kind of thing that you would use to clean your computers or your appliances out that have lots of electrical components. So, it’s pressurized and it’s in a little tube. These come with all of them, so you can put these right into your drink and reinvigorate that. Now your final option for keeping drinks lasting a really long time, especially, if you are on a long professional shoot, is to use something that’s called foam booster. Now it is expensive, but it does work very very well if you need drinks to hold their head for a very long time. You can find that at professional food photography warehouses online. Again it’s called foam booster. Thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoy this. If you did, leave me a comment below and let me know. And also let me know if you have other ideas for future episodes. Make sure that you subscribe to our page and click the link in the description box to get subscribed directly to messages from us, and to get yourself one of our most valuable free cheat sheets. I can’t wait to see you again. See you next time.