Food Props on Sunday-first installment

Some time ago I made survey here to see if there were any readers who are interested to read about food props and there were quite a lot of you who said yes. Since then I have seen several posts about food styling (like this and this) but very little and often very short pieces about the actual food props. Here I will avoid the subject of food styling and only concentrate how to build up a collection of food props and I hope I will inspire you to start building up your own in case you haven't already caught the bug! The other day I got a comment on a post that finally got me going so here is the first instalment of my new Food Props on Sunday series, my plan is to make several installments on the basics of food propping or maybe I should say how I do it because I'm not sure a lot of food photographers agrees with me but on the other hand, we all have to find what works for us! Background settings; plates, knives and forks; textiles; odds and ends are the subjects I will talk about but today I will just talk about food props in general.

I am a bit of a hoarder and that has helped me a lot to collect a rather varied stash of food props. Our house has three floors, the last one is smaller and not very comfortable but it suits me fine because there I can put all my food props, that is those I don't use in the kitchen obviously. I already had some useful props when I started food blogging but most of it I have collected since. I am always on the lookout for plates, glasses, textiles, odds and ends and I hardly ever enter a shop without looking for something useful. I go to thrift shops, tableware shops, shops where they sell textiles and shops where they sell knick-knack. Shops for stationary, gift shops - wherever I can see that there might be something waiting for me. Lucky I don't go shopping too often.

I also inherited quite a lot of things from my parents that I can use. My mother and I loved to go to thrift shops together, we did a lot before I moved to Italy and before she got Alzheimer's and sometimes I can almost hear her saying to me when I do the photo editing "Oh look, that's that old glass I got from...."
In the beginning of my blogging I used mostly papers as backgrounds so now I have a large collection of papers of various colours, shapes, patterns and sizes. I also have lots of textiles of various colours, shapes, patterns and sizes. See, collecting food props is all about variety within each kind of prop, I always find that I am missing some colour or pattern and that I need to get more variety. It is lucky that rarely you don't need more that one or two of each thing, otherwise I'd need this (but how I wish it was mine!)

I love my prop collection, some things I use over and over again, some things are still waiting for the right photo and some I suspect will never be used but who knows, one day I might need it! Isn't that what it is all about, building up a collection so that you feel confident that you can shoot almost anything in the style you want in that precise moment?

I hope you will find this little series useful and that it inspires you, if so - come back next Sunday for more!