There’s probably no other American holiday as closely associated with food as Thanksgiving. Not only is this annual celebration an opportunity to gather with loved ones to acknowledge the blessings in your life—it’s also a chance to enjoy an abundance of traditional dishes that you usually only indulge in on the fourth Thursday in November.

That’s why no pictorial of your own Thanksgiving gathering would be complete without capturing the bountiful banquet that’s beautifully presented on your dining room table. Portrait and food photographer Hernan Rodriguez uses three different lenses to memorialize his own Thanksgiving meals: The Tamron 90mm macro, the 70-200mm zoom, and the 60mm macro. “Using different focal lengths totally changes the look of the image,” he says. “I’ll use the 90mm to get really close to the food, for example, to get that banana cake right up in your face. Then I’ll maybe switch to the 70-200mm zoom to maybe knock down reflections or to compress the background. And the 60mm macro gives me the latitude to get the whole table.”

The first thing Rodriguez takes into consideration when scoping out his setup for a holiday meal is the background. “I like to add ambience to the image,” he says. “So I’ll incorporate a lot into the background—what’s behind is important to project what’s in front. I start building up my table starting with the tablecloth and the dishes, setting up a color palette and patterns. Sometimes patterns don’t work too well, but in the case of Thanksgiving, a foliage-patterned tablecloth, for example, works perfectly. In terms of color, I’ll try to complement the food: With the lemon cake, for example, I tried to add some color next to it with the yellow to make it pop. Or in some shots with the cake, I used blue art paper.”

Once he’s finessed his setup, Rodriguez puts his tripod into position and starts figuring out the best angles. “I start with my focal point, which would be the turkey in this case, to determine the best angle and the best position,” he says. “I go with whatever I think looks best. Sometimes I’m not looking through the viewfinder, though, but simply looking loosely, so it’s important for me to go back and see everything through the lens. My lens choice changes my perspective, too.”

When he’s finally ready to shoot, Rodriguez has to work quickly—not only does he have a hungry horde of family members waiting to dig in, but some of the appetizers, side dishes, and desserts apparently have a short shelf life as well. “Certain foods last longer than others, but there are some that you don’t have much time with at all,” he explains. “Salad, for example, withers within about three minutes. In that case, you might want to have four separate bowls ready to go, bringing the first one out just for the test shoot and then the others after that. Cheese is pretty tough, too, if you like to serve cheese as an appetizer—after a few minutes, it starts to melt and eventually turns into a glob. You can do some food-prep tricks to make certain foods last longer, like brushing olive oil onto tomatoes and cucumbers, but in general you’ve just got to work quickly.”

It’s most important to keep an eye on the guest of honor. “Don’t overcook the turkey—you don’t want it have too dark of a texture,” says Rodriguez. “You want to watch it as it’s cooking and gauge the color until it’s that nice golden brown. Then just varnish it—put some butter on top, or baste it with its own juices. And make sure you use a really good carving knife. You want to get some shots of the carved bird, but you want the texture of a nice cut, not a jagged one.”

Isolating a certain dish or even a part of a food item can add an appetizing effect. “I’ll push back everything I don’t want as an emphasis and bring forward the turkey or another main focal point,” he says. “I’ll shoot for a shallow depth-of-field: Sometimes I’ll blur the mashed potatoes in front, for instance. Or maybe I’ll keep just the icing on a cupcake in focus, while the rest of the cupcake is blurred out. I also like to shoot from a lower angle and bring that food item right up to your face.”

There are two lighting approaches you can take when illuminating this special repast. “Your lighting will be dictated by what you’re trying to do,” Rodriguez explains. “If you’re trying to show the whole table from front to back and you need all of that in focus, you need a lot of wattage and power; I’d use flash in that situation. But for something where you want more of a mood, where you want to project the plates of food, I’d use a lot of continuous light. In shots like that, I set up my Westcott Spiderlites, which are daylight-balanced fluorescent lights, and put them in huge softboxes.”

To create the best look, Rodriguez lights the food from behind to increase the shadows up front. “I think the reason a lot of food images look unappetizing is because of a lack of shadows,” he explains. “Shadows are just as important as the highlights. By lighting from behind, it creates more depth as the shadows come forward. Then I get cards, boards, or little mirrors to highlight certain spots of the food; I bring the boards in the front for fill. Plus, with continuous light, what you see is what you get: If it’s too bright, you can see it and pull it back a little bit.”

Rodriguez loves the color that’s often prevalent on a well-appointed Thanksgiving table, but it can be difficult to ensure that the colors of all of these different victuals remain intact. “You want to limit your light sources,” he says. “If you’re shooting with continuous lights, for example, you have to kill all other lights, like the overhead lights or light coming in a window. When I’m shooting with continuous lights, I’m usually shooting at 1/30 of a second, and if I have light coming from different places, I’m going to get different temperature shifts. I’ll also white-balance with a gray card.”

While Thanksgiving is a time to reflect, certain foods prove more difficult to photograph due to their own reflective nature. “Cranberries, for instance, are shiny and have their own juice,” Rodriguez explains. “A wine bottle is also quite reflective—it’s going to serve as a mirror of sorts. This can be a problem when you’ve got a turkey (which you want to light a little more to show its texture) and a bowl of cranberries right next to it.”

To combat this problem, Rodriguez advises “feathering” the light onto more specular objects. “The angle of incidence is the angle of reflection,” he says. “Where the light hits on a product like a wine bottle or a bowl of cranberries is what’s going to reflect back onto the lens. Therefore, don’t have direct light hit the actual reflective object—angle it away from the reflective item and just have the edges of the light, a gradated light, fall on that object. That way, the shadows and highlights are on that item, but direct light isn’t, so it doesn’t reflect back so brightly. Another easy thing that anyone can do is bring out little 8x10 cards to use as reflectors: They really brighten the front end by creating specular highlights in the front.”

In the end, though, Thanksgiving isn’t Thanksgiving without a picture of the family gathered around the festive feast. After you’ve taken all of your “posed” food shots, it’s time to congregate the clan and freeze this special moment in time. The challenge is how to best capture two competing subjects: the dinner and the folks about to eat it. “Your biggest concern is how deep the shot is going to go—you have to choose the right aperture to carry the depth from the front to the back,” says Rodriguez. “You might want to shoot at, say, f/8 and shoot with a wider-angle lens rather than a zoom to get that depth and get everyone in focus.”

Your lighting should also shift at this point, according to Rodriguez. “You should concentrate on making sure the people in your shots are well lit, because the viewer is going to automatically be drawn to the people in the shot first, and the food on the table second,” he says. “This is where you want them to be looking—to get a sense of the feeling around the table.”

For more of Hernan Rodriguez’s work, go to www.hernanphotography.com.