Intro to Food Photography: Beef Skewers

As most of you know, most of my previous work as a Photographer has been on fields such as Architecture, Portrait, Music Photography, Travel and a couple of others but, lately, my eye has been drawn to Food Photography, and well, it is only natural having a Chef sister who not only cooks things that taste amazingly but who also makes things look so awesome you pretty much drool in front of them. I've been shooting some of the things she cooks for some time now but merely cause I love shooting anything and everything, until sometime ago that I realized Food is a subject that actually inspires me to shoot and I feel happy when I do it. So naturally, I wanna do it more often and more "formally", if you will. I wanna practice as much as I can since it's a subject field I'd like to master eventually.

Today, I am posting what I like to call "My Official Introduction to Food Photography", and I such introduction is with something that looks pretty good and, let me tell you, tasted just as good: Beef Skewers!

Now, I am not a Chef but a Photographer so please do not expect me to share recipes with you as I am not good at that, so rather, I'll just talk a bit about the process and the photographs.


You start with some tomato, green and red pepper, and onions which make for a very Mexican dish.

Once everything is chopped, including the beef, get some toothpicks and start inserting everything into them; combining them in a way they make sort of a beautiful color flag.

You want to get something like this in every toothpick.

Have a frying pan with a little cooking oil on ready at a low flame and, once you have a batch of skewers ready, put them on the frying pan carefully to make sure they don't touch each other to avoid them from sticking one to another.

When you see them getting a nice brownish color, that means they're cooked on the lower side and it's time to turn them over. You see how good they look on the already cooked side?

You need to be checking on them to make sure they don't burn out but they do get the right color and degree of doneness.

This is what you want it to look like: juicy, brownish and seemingly rich.

Once you are done cooking all of the skewers, you put them all together on a tray.

However, if you're not convinced with just laying them over the tray, you can always step it up and make a bit of a nicer presentation by adding a bed of lettuce or anything else that you think will bring up the dish's look.

Remember, love at first sight works with food, too!

I mean, can you honestly tell me you're not drooling right now just by looking at this juicy, fresh and delish-looking skewers?

A yummy salad is always a good idea to go with pretty much any dish; you can mix it up a bit and add some of the green and red pepper you had left from the skewers and cut it in a creative way not to have a "boring" salad by your dish.

Add any dressing of your preference to spice it up a bit and the result will be a salad you can't resist!

Besides having a dressing for the salad, it is always good to have some dressing for the main dish, in this case, the beef skewers. Being beef makes it easier to accompany it with a wide variety of dressings so everybody can pick their favorite and that way you can't go wrong!

So, you finally have your delicious skewers very well presented and accompanied by a nice dressing, in this case, Green Pepper dressing which makes it an interesting combination; and, a side of fresh salad and voilá, you have a delicious dish you simply cannot resist! Bon appétit!

Special thanks to Gichef  for cooking so amazingly and share it with me so I can share it with you!