How to take frame-worthy photos of chocolate

Have you ever purchased an especially beautiful bar of chocolate and needed to capture the moment digitally? Maybe you wanted to make your friends jealous of your indulgent Western Chocolate Company confection, or perhaps you’re gearing up to be a social media influencer for products made from cacao beans. Either way, there is a right way and a wrong way to do food photography, especially when it comes to chocolate.

The problem with our favorite treat is that it can be visually one note, obscuring the depth of flavor that lies within. How do you capture the nuances of chocolate in a photo? We’ve snapped up (get it?) some photography tips to really make your images shine. 

Rely on your props.

As we already mentioned, chocolate is one color, and it’s usually not very exciting unless you’re handling ruby chocolate - in which case you probably didn’t need photography tips to begin with. So what should you do, short of splattering food color over it?

It might help to re-frame the situation. Sure, brown is not quite as exciting as a bold red or neon green, but brown is a classic and arresting color in the right circumstances. The key is to bring in small props that not only work with brown but also enhance it. Start with a light background for dark or milk chocolates. Black and white decorative elements can play up the classic nature of brown. Colorful flower buds might offer a nice contrast. Use what you have on hand to experiment with color.

Make sure the location is right.

There are a few things to take into consideration when figuring out where to photograph food. When it comes to chocolate, the most important element is the temperature. If the room is too warm, the chocolate will melt, so make sure you’re in a cool environment. Otherwise your staging area will be a mess pretty quickly. 

For the same reason, you should make sure the sun is not beating down on the chocolate, or else you’ll be photographing chocolate soup. But that doesn’t mean natural light is all bad. In fact, you should definitely shoot using natural light if possible. As long as it’s not coming from directly overhead, it will be a superior illumination to the flash on your camera

Be prepared to zoom in.

Capturing chocolate can be difficult because it’s a pretty small subject in the lens of the camera. You’ll often have to get an up close look at the product with a macro lens or the zoom function, which means lots of detail will show up. Details can be a beautiful thing, including imperfections, but you should generally try to avoid the unnatural imperfections - like fingerprint marks or smudges - that can mar the overall appearance and make the chocolate look less than appetizing.

Get ready to edit.

If your photo didn’t turn out exactly the way you hoped it would, don’t get too upset. As long as you have generally good resolution and can see the photo well, it’s time to take your best photo to the editing room. You can use a program like Photoshop, or go for the built-in editing software on most social media apps. Play around with the crop tool to get the subject in focus and manipulate the brightness, contrast, and other values to make the photo really pop.

Once your masterpiece is finished, it’s time to post it for the world to see - or maybe just send it to the family group chat and make your sister jealous. That’s time well spent, and worthy of a chocolate bar reward.