Houston's Food Photography Ace
Shooting your food: It's tougher than you think
Local photographer Ralph Smith is an expert at the difficult art of shootingfood as this gallery shows.
Courtesy photo
The thick burger sliding off a bun on the cover of Bon Appétit. An ooey-gooey grilled Gouda on Saveur. That crumbly, juicy apple tart in Food + Wine.
These are the pictures that make our stomach ache with desire, make us want, no, need. That. Right. Now.
That’s the goal. And it’s a tricky one. Photographing food is an art form far more concerned with beauty than taste. Professional food photographers, like lifelong Houstonian Ralph Smith, want you to want the food. Making the food taste as good as it looks is somebody else’s job.
From braised scallops to chocolate-dripping cookies to foamy mugs of beer, Smith has photographed fare for over two decades for renowned chefs, local restaurants and major companies. He started in graphic design after graduating from University of Houston, but became one of the lucky guys who turned his passion into a career.
This is a man who loves food. Loves to eat it, cook it. Loves to photograph it.
“It’s work, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing,” Smith says.
His 14,000-square-foot space just west of the Loop has three studios; two professional-grade, oversized kitchens (someone has to cook the food before he photographs it); plenty of storage for napkins, bowls, tiles, silverware, blankets, rope and all other accoutrements a shoot may require; an outdoor pool; and a garden plentiful with kumquats, peppers, kale and everything in between.
He picks and rubs the herbs like a tailor with a silk shirt. Like a blacksmith with metal.
If anything gets Smith, it’s ice cream. Good to eat. Tough to shoot. Pizza is another difficult subject. You have to shoot pizza in its stringy-stretchy-bubbly cheese hotness. So you use high-fat cheese because it melts much better and a steamer just before the shot. It’s not about taste. It’s about making you want it.
That quotient is different these days, Smith says. He once had requests for pictures of food that were “so freaking perfect you didn’t want to eat it.” But that’s how high-end food was then. Restaurants made entrees so beautiful, you hesitated to dig right in.
Now, food is more approachable. In restaurants and in pictures.
Approachable but beautiful, Smith says. Beautiful enough to eat.
