by Russell Waldron

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 11, 2009

Not getting what you expected at the fast food restaurant? Ordered chicken fillets burgers with a fresh garden salad and a large size bucket of crispy fries and been disappointed? The meal does not resemble the advertisements in any manner whatsoever, the chicken tastes like an old boot, the limp salad is playing hide-and-seek beneath the bun and the sauce tastes like granny's burnt custard. The fries are so burnt your teeth are in danger of breaking if you dare chew them. How can this be? This fast food meal was advertised on television as the best in the county!

You're not the first and you won't be the last to be let down, it's all in the quality of the photography and mind play that advertisers carry out. Day and night, day in, day out, we are bombarded with advertisements for tasty moist cakes, scrumptious kebabs, lemon meringue pies which melt in the mouth and so much more. But that huge thick meat patty shown on television looks nothing at all like the anorexic patty you've finally found hidden beneath the lettuce on your bread roll.

The big juicy flame grilled steak sandwich which made you salivate while watching television ends up being nothing more than a piece of thin chewy leather. Obviously you're annoyed and want to know why fast food always looks better on television and in magazines than in reality. Those ads were extremely impressive, but now you wish to find out why you paid good money for something which doesn't look at all like you imagined.

Having been involved in the television industry as a child, quite a few lessons were learned. Photography and know-how go hand in hand. Good lighting, color enhancement, food coloring and so much more goes into food photography preparation. Don't blame the poor kid who served you the unsatisfactory meal, blame the companies who hire these crafty professional photographers, make-up artists and marketing agents, it's their tricks of the trade which sell.

Another thing to remember is that makeup artists don't just work on faces, they are frequently engaged in beautifying a host of things such as foods, pets and so forth. It doesn't take much to airbrush a picture, enlarge it, or even add color and substance to its presentation. Television is not all about reality, it's often about image. Allow me to elaborate.

PHOTOGRAHY:

With such advancements in technology it's a well known fact that we can alter numerous things in regards to photographs. Thin people can be made to look fat and vice versa. Tomatoes,

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