Blogging Tips

Tips to get your photos accepted by Foodgawker

Foodgawker is a website where food bloggers can post their photos. As this website have photos from the bloggers around the world and also various bloggers visit that website on daily basis,there is a high chance if your photos get accepted in foodgawker would increase the traffic. I came to know this very late on my blogging journey and when i started to post my photos on foodgawker, i got  lot of rejections for various reason and some of the reasons that i don't even understand then.
Few of my accepted photos are below,to check all click here

Whenever i feel good about my photos, i did submit the photos to foodgawker and when it was rejected , i lost hope and stopped uploading the photos for a while,then again i would start,this was go on and off for past 2 years.Later i was released that the photos would be first thing to bring traffic to your website.So for the past 6 months, i have taken it as serious and work on it,now i  have more than 50 photos on foodgawker. So here i'm sharing the tips that i learned from this journey,by saying so,i don't  acclaim myself as professional photographer.

  • Always use natural sunlight.
  • If you're beginner in photography, always use natural sunlight for your food photography.Foodgawker accepts only well lit photos, if you're image has low lighting, then you got rejection with message as "low lighting and/or underexposed".
Rejected for low lighting
  • Take photo from top angle of the food or at right angle from the food, though photos look good at other angle, i noticed that foodgawker accept those photo more than the other angle. That way you can avoid "Composition-awkward angle" reason for rejection.

                               Rejected for awkward angle
  • Always submit photos and link to the recipe, if you failed to link to proper recipe or linked to your home page, you would get rejection with the message as  "due to increased submissions, we prefer posts with a recipe"
  • Don't reduce the size of the image too much,it will reduce the sharpness of the image and you got rejection with message as "dull/unsharp when reduced in size" .
  • Try to avoid watermarks in the image, if do,dont crop them in the submission,it should be fully visible in the image,otherwise you got rejection for "if a watermark is necessary, please make sure it is not cropped."
  • In the photos,food should be prominent than the props you used in the photo. Otherwise you got rejection with message as "photo/food composition".
                                                         Rejected for food composition                                                                 
  • During initial stage of submission, i got lot of rejection for the reason "lighting/white balance issues", that means the colors of the image looks unnatural. see the difference in the below images 
Rejected
Accepted
  • To be more precise, make sure that the white color you have seen in your naked eyes should be captured as white in your photography.So i started using white background in my most food photography to understand the white balance. Still i find it hard to balance white in other color background. 
  • I have used photo editing tools only for adding watermarks & crop the image,other than that i don't have much knowledge about the editing tools,so i tried to capture as good as possible.

Though i have more than 25+ rejections by foodgawker, i learned a lot from this journey and also i tried to avoid rejection for the same reason. Actually i feel good that someone is really looked into my photos and evaluate and gave me the reasons why it's not good as i think. And also i'm glad that the photos i'm posting in my blogging is really good. 
If you have any other difficulties while posting photos to foodgawker other than what i shared here, please do leave your comment, will learn together to overcome those difficulties.

-Sandhiya




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