Feeding her passion

Food photographer Donna Crous cooks and captures her own creations. Niall Hampton gets a taste of her home‑based operation

- Donna Crous

Photographing food is becoming more and more popular. Whether it’s snapped on a phone or captured by a camera, it’s a fun entrée to mastering composition and lighting techniques – two essential ingredients of still-life photography. And, as shown in our February issue, while a keen enthusiast can get great results with a basic camera setup, it’s genuinely fascinating to see how a professional food photographer approaches a shoot. Just how much work needs to go into turning an attractive-looking dish into a fine-art photograph?

Thanks to spending a day with Donna Crous, we’re about to find out. Donna’s career has risen like a soufflé since making it to the finals of Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year in 2017. Her distinctive style is built around rich-coloured dishes served in artisan receptacles that pop from rustic backdrops, augmented by creative uses of shadow. Viewing the images on Donna’s website and Instagram feed, it’s tempting to think that she puts all this together in a £500-a-day-plus studio. In reality, it’s all shot in her house in the home counties.

There’s a very good reason for doing this: unlike some food photographers, Donna actually cooks and styles the dishes she shoots, so she needs close proximity to a kitchen. This also means that she has complete control of the creative process: before she buys any ingredients to make a given recipe, Donna has already thought how it’s going to be photographed and what kind of look she’s trying to achieve.

Although she favours natural light for her photography, Donna has also incorporated a Rotolight Neo 2 into her current setup. This allows her to balance changes in ambient light levels, and to pick out individual elements of the food and make them come to life.