What’s the correct term for photographing plated food from a high angle?

Question

I need to brief a food photographer more clearly. The current shots are too frontal/low-angle, so I end up distorting them in layout to show more of the food on the plate. What I actually want is a higher camera angle—almost overhead, but not completely flat—so viewers can see most of the dish while still keeping a little depth.

Is there a standard photography term I can use for this kind of food shot, and is it better to describe it by name or by specifying the camera angle?

user11924 · Accepted Answer

I used to do a lot of mechanical drafting. We would define a particular view that you are describing in terms of oblique angle from the normal, where normal is the orthogonal view – that is, the perpendicular view, from directly above the plate looking straight down.

All you need to do is specify the angle that the center of the lens is pointing at the center of the plate. In drafting, we would describe this angle as degrees less than 90º (where 90º is the top-down angle looking at the plate, and angles less than 90º appear more and more like the left (undesirable) image you show).

As an example, we would use ellipse templates that showed what a circle (usually a hole drilled in a part) would look like at different oblique angles:

From the template, you can see that ellipses (i.e., plate of food) that are increasingly more circular correspond to higher angles, culminating in perfect circles that are just "90º ellipses".

What’s the correct term for photographing plated food from a high angle?

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