Red berries and food photography

Red berries with vanilla cream and shortbread (recipe below)

 I've been spending all my free time writing a marketing assignment for my Master's, but here's a quick post with some photos I took for a food photography class I enrolled in on Skillshare.com (which is an amazing site by the way!)


I studied photography waay back in highschool so at one point I did know how to use an SLR camera, all the aperture and f-stop stuff.. But I really don't remember very much now. Here's a first attempt at some styled food photography, but only using the automatic focus on a digital camera. Once I get some time I'll try to use a DSLR and see how that compares...

This first dish is a super easy and delicious dessert from Jamie Oliver's 30-minute meals (the chicken pie from the same meal is something I make pretty often).
Here's the recipe below, which should take less than 5 minutes to put together.

Quick berries and cream dessert:
400g mixed berries
Elderflower cordial
½ a lemon
2 sprigs of fresh mint
A few shortbread biscuits, to serve
150ml double cream
1 heaped tbsp icing sugar
1 tbsp vanilla paste or extract

 1. Put the berries into a serving dish and pour over some cordial and lemon juice, then mix together.
2. Tear up the mint leaves and sprinkle over the berries.
3. Whip up the cream, sugar and vanilla with electric mixer until thick.
4. Serve berries and cream with the biscuits, and enjoy :)

As I was making myself some breakfast at the same time, I took some photos of that too:

Strawberry jam on bread with berries, red currant-orange juice and glazed chestnut yogurt

These turned out well enough I think, but I'll try to play around with the focus for future photos.