Difference between food styling and garnishing ?

[perfection]

Please enlighten me what exactly is the difference between food styling and food garnishing or are they just synonymns?

[Greg]

Food styling is making food look good for photographs (garnishing being part of that). Garnishing is adding something as a decoration to a plate of food that is to be eaten. Garnishes should be related to the dish in some way (as in representative of an ingredient in the dish, like a rosemary sprig for a dish that contains rosemary) or be a part of the dish (like lemon wedges or wheels on fish, or parsley on a pasta).

[foodnfoto]

Food styling is a specific type of profession that involves preparing food to be photographed, filmed or videotaped.

I work as a food stylist to produce food photographs used in editorials (magazines), cookbooks, advertising, packaging and promotional/educational videos. (I only put food editor as my profile because there was no accurate title to pick from when writing my profile.) However, food stylists also work with food companies and commodities boards to develop and edit recipes to promote their products. The best food stylists have strong culinary backgrounds along with marketing and editorial experience.

We generally work as part of a 4 person creative team that is comprised of an art or creative director, a photographer, a prop stylist and a food stylist. Our work involves collaboration with all members of this team in deciding what is the best way to present the food, making sure that we have a clear message to the targeted audience and that all parts work together to achieve that goal. It's more than just plating food nicely on a plate and picking a pretty garnish. It's deciding whether it should have garnish at all, choosing what kind of dishware it should be shown on with what other props, which angle to shoot from, what kind of lighting etc, etc, etc.

You can see some of my work in my albums posted in the Cheftalk photo galleries. Compare the work that I've done with professional photographers to my photo essay on the tomato sandwich that I took with my camera (clearly, I'm not a great photographer, though I try). I think the difference is fairly clear.