Food Photography Essentials: Free Recipe Planner

What does it take to be a food photographer? How do you become a fast, efficient, and competent expert in photographing every recipe? What food photography essentials do you need to know to succeed? 

Where do you even start?

One place to begin is with Pretty Focused’s Free Recipe Planner. This free download is about helping you become a more organized, efficient, creative, and flourishing food photographer. So, what is it and how does it work? 

Inside Our Free Recipe Session Planner

Pretty Focused’s Recipe Session Planner is a three-page PDF designed to help you plan your recipe sessions so you can get the photos you need without extra work. It’s all about saving you time and reducing stress. Here’s how it works.

Page 1: Individual Recipe Plan

We designed the first page to help you break down an individual recipe into four critical steps: the food photography essentials.

• Shots Needed: This is an opportunity to list every picture you must take as you complete the recipe. Be as specific as possible, i.e., cake fresh out of the oven, cake out of the pan and on the cooling rack, cake with a few pieces cut, solo piece of cake, etc.
• Styling Items: In this section of the PDF, you can create a bulleted list of every styling item you’ll require for your food photography photoshoot. Outline the bowls, plates, silverware, cooking utensils, linen, styling boards, and more.
• Prep: Here, you’ll outline what items or situations you must prepare before taking photos. For example, after you make your cake, what else do you need to prep before photos: whipped cream, fresh-cut berries, chocolate sauce, etc.?
• Additional Notes: Finally, this last section is where you can write reminders to take photos at certain angles or include a specifically requested shot from the blogger. 

Page 2: Weekly Planner

The second page of the PDF is our favorite for improving your organization and reducing stress. It’s our weekly planner, where you can plan out all the recipes/work you have in front of you. Instead of just jumping into projects as you think of them, you can organize your to-do list into the most efficient workflow possible.

For example, let’s say you have five recipes due this week and need time for administrative work. In our weekly planner, you can determine the best time to complete each recipe based on the items needed, the required time, and your life schedule. The idea is to help you have a more efficient workflow every week.

Page 3: Sketch it Out

The final page of the PDF is for photographers who work better visually. This page gives you five blank boxes to draw out your table setup or sketch what you’re looking for in a final result. You can also use the blank space to create flow charts, draw vision boards, or anything that requires open space and creativity. Whatever food photography essentials you can think of can be included here.

Benefits of Using a Recipe Planner for Food Photography

So, what do you get from using our FREE recipe session planner? Is it worth the effort of printing out and using it? Yes! Here are four primary benefits, and there are countless more you’ll discover on your own.

Improved Organization for Every Photoshoot

Too often, food photographers go into their recipe sessions without a plan. They’re unsure what photos are needed and hope they can just wing it and get what they want by the end. Not only does this attitude create unnecessary stress, but it almost always means that you miss something you really wanted.

But with our recipe session planner, you can outline the food photography essentials you must accomplish in every photoshoot. This eliminates guesswork and stops you from running around like a chicken with your head cut off as you try to figure out “What next?” The more you can write down your to-do list and follow along from the start, the more organized and happy you’ll be.

Read how Amber figured out how to be a food photographer and a stay-at-home mom of 7.

More Efficient Workflow

Using the recipe session planner can also help you analyze your current food photography processes and find areas for improvement. The key is creating a hierarchy of goals and projects to prioritize in the weekly planner and creating a map or workflow on the “Sketch it Out” page. 

From there, you can dig into your detailed recipe process and develop a clear set of needs for each photoshoot. These needs shouldn’t change drastically between recipes, so once you have the “must-dos,” you can keep them for each food photography shoot, maximizing efficiency.

If anyone knows something about efficient workflows, it’s Melissa, a Project Manager who became a professional food blog photographer after Pretty Focused.

Enhance Food Photography Creativity

At times, we all lack creativity and inspiration. It is too easy to fall into a rut, but in a highly creative field like food photography, that’s the last thing you can afford. And it might not seem like it, but being more organized and efficient actually helps develop opportunities for creativity. 

That’s because the more stressed you are about doing the basics, the less time and energy you have to be creative. But if you have all your basic needs taken care of—the photos you need, the styling items, the prep—then you can spend time coming up with new ideas and possibilities. It opens up the potential for experimentation, a food photography essential for success.

Robin knows something about discovering creativity! Read her Pretty Focused graduate story here.

Reduced Stress with Planning

Last but certainly not least, our recipe session planner is designed to reduce your stress monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. We all know the workload and stress that comes with planning. It’s an invisible workload, but figuring out how you will do everything and when can be highly stressful. Writing it out is the first step to taking that stress off your plate.

Sure, at first, it might seem like more work to have to fill out our recipe planner every week. But once you get into the habit and the hang of it, it will become the first tool you reach for to organize your job and take the pressure off.

Discover All of Pretty Focused’s Food Photography Essentials Today!

As Alexander Graham Bell said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” And Pretty Focused’s FREE recipe session planner is all about preparing you to be the best food photographer you can be. We promise you’ll love it, and even if you don’t. It’s no big deal because it’s FREE!

But if you find it helpful, know it’s just the beginning. Pretty Focused has many more food photography essentials ready and waiting for you. Whether you take our full course, sign up for our free training, join a Masterclass, or take camera basics, we are here to help!