Do you take pictures of your food? I’ll bet you do. That sizzling homemade steak, a brilliant kale salad at your favorite bistro – you just have to capture it all on your phone. But could your pictures do more? Professional food photographer Lisa Shen teaches you to look at a feast with a true artist’s eye.

Do you take pictures of your food? I’ll bet you do. That sizzling homemade steak, a brilliant kale salad at your favorite bistro, those mouth-watering scoops of raspberry gelato – just like everyone else, you pull out your phone and snap pictures for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Line. But when we look back at those pictures, something is missing. How can we capture the sensation and its excitement with the mechanical eye of our camera? Professional food photographer Lisa Shen is here to talk about just that.

This luxurious book, full of luxurious full-color photographs, describes the process of food photography as work of narrative and discovery. Its chapters cover light, composition, sequence, advanced techniques, and photo editing in detail as Lisa lays every secret of her art out in plain but enticingly personal prose.

Pictures of food – this thing that connects us to life – should tell a story. One bowl of oatmeal may contain a cornucopia of textures and colors, and the table on which the bowl sits, the wall behind it, the light in the room can amplify that effect or mute it. As Lisa tells the stories of the many portraits that appear in this book, she describes everything in terms of her own life and what the scene means to her. Color, texture, and composition are drawn together by the photographer’s own personality to form a story all their own. How to tell stories with the food you love in the spaces you love is exactly what Lisa Shen aims to teach.