Tips On Shooting Utensils And Cutlery In The Kitchen

The kitchen holds a world of photo opportunities and all you need is some imagination to exploit it.

Gear Suggestions:

Your DSLR and a tripod are essential but in terms of lighting, the free stuff that falls through your windows will work just find, however feel free to experiment with flash and other forms of lighting too. For example, for one of the shots further down the page, a torch was used to create contrasty light.

Techniques To Try:

Things like pots and pans, colanders and, as here, a trivet can be pressed into service as subjects. A kitchen work surface will make a perfectly good background but so can the sink or any material you have in your house. Objects can be arranged on the worktop in various compositions, with the camera and lens aimed downwards.


The trivet above was photographed with the camera in auto white-balance and it worked fine, but for the colander, the camera was switched to incandescent white-balance to give the overall blue colour cast. Pulling away slightly and including the stainless steel sink give an interesting backdrop. Filling in the shadows was done with some silver foil just held in position.


For the shot of the wooden spoons, a torch was placed on its side, creating a very oblique, contrasty light. The camera was left in autoexposure mode using the exposure compensation control to correct exposures. Focusing was done manually on this occasion and the VC feature turned off – obviously it was not needed with the camera on a tripod. The shutter was fired using the self-timer. Exposures were in the order of 1/8sec at f/8 with the camera set to ISO 200. In auto white-balance, the torch gives a cool light and this can be warmed up during Raw processing. If you prefer, or if you are shooting JPEG, a custom white-balance setting is suggested or try the shade or cloudy preset. Again, silver foil was used as a reflector.

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