Abstract:
Food photography creates appearances. Various factors such as camera angle, food
decoration, and photography art composition can all contribute to attractiveness. Furthermore, one of the factors in food photography that creates light and shadow in photographs is lighting setup. Generally, main lights and fill lights were used to provide brightness and to determine the direction and size of food shadows. As a result, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of lighting direction in food photography on attractiveness.
Three types of Thai food, Pad Thai, Som Tum Thai, and Tom Yum Goong, were photographed with two lighting combinations of the direction of the light at vertical elevation angles and the direction of the light at horizontal side angles. Each food category has a total of 25 food photographs. The experiment included 51 volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 48 years old. They were asked to rate food photographs on a 5-point Likert scale based on seven emotions: attractiveness, like, appetite, dynamic, fresh, tasty, and intense flavor.
The experimental results revealed that changing the lighting direction in the vertical and
horizontal side angles influenced the mean score of attractiveness, likeness, dynamic, appetite,
freshness, and flavor intensity in food photographs (p<.001). When the lighting of vertical angles was increased, the sense of emotions in food photographs increased. It was also found that the brighter food photos could increase their attractiveness. According to the findings of the correlation analysis between the seven emotions, the correlation was directly variable, with a high degree of correlation between attractiveness and like.