Showing lamination and crumb

The difference between a good croissant and a bad one is invisible from the outside and obvious from the side. The same is true of sourdough: the crust tells you something, the crumb tells you everything.

Bakeries that photograph only the outside of their products are hiding their best argument.

The cut face is the product photograph

For anything where interior structure is a quality signal — bread, laminated pastry, layered cakes — the cut is the image that does the work.

Cut cleanly with a sharp serrated knife, and cut when the product has cooled enough to hold its structure. A warm loaf cut early tears rather than slices and photographs badly.

Photograph the cut face square on, filling most of the frame, and light it from the side so that every hole and every layer casts a shadow. Flat frontal light turns a beautiful open crumb into a flat beige rectangle.

Raking light is the whole technique

This deserves stating on its own, because it is the difference between a photograph that sells and one that does not.

Crumb structure is a landscape of holes and ridges. Layers in pastry are a stack of thin planes. Both are geometry, and geometry only shows when light comes across it rather than at it.

Put the light to one side, almost parallel to the cut face, and look through the camera as you move it. There is an angle at which the structure suddenly reads. Photograph there.

Photograph pastry from the end

A croissant, a pain au chocolat or a kouign-amann shows its lamination at the cut end.

Stand one on its end, or cut one across, and photograph the layers. Get close — this is a detail photograph, not a product shot — and keep the light low.

If your lamination is good, one photograph of a cut end does more for your bakery than a full window display, because it is evidence rather than presentation.

Steam, shine and the fresh cues

Freshness has visual signals and they are all short-lived:

Sheen on the crust, present for the first half hour.

Steam, visible only against a dark background with light behind it.

Flaking, where a pastry sheds visible shards when handled — photograph this while cutting, with the shards on the board.

Butter shine on the interior of laminated pastry, which shows for a few minutes after cutting.

These are worth planning for rather than hoping for. Decide which one you want, set up, then cut.

Do not over-style bread

Bread photographs badly when it is styled like a magazine. Scattered flour, artfully placed wheat stalks and rustic linen everywhere read as staging, and the product gets lost.

A loaf, a board, a knife, one clean light. The bread is the interesting thing; anything else competes with it.

What is preserved when you stage

The crumb, the layers, the crust colour and the flour on the surface all come through from your photograph, including the fact that your holes are irregular and your lamination is not machine-perfect. That irregularity is the evidence.

What staging changes is the board underneath, the light quality and the setting. So the cut has to be photographed properly first — sharp knife, raking light, close in — and then it can sit anywhere you like.