“The Girls Who Ate the World” Beautifully Capture Food

Last Updated on 08/04/2015 by Julius Motal

All photographs are copyrighted and used with permission by The Girls Who Ate the World.

Vic, Stayc and Angelato are The Girls Who Ate the World. Hailing from Sydney, Australia, the three of them are avid food bloggers who take beautiful and sumptuous photographs of their meals, and they’ve managed to harness the power of Instagram to build a community. After looking that image above, the staff here now has a hankering for a glazed cronut. They’ve got such an eye for light, composition and taste that we had to find out more the moment Angelato pitched their food photography to us.

Phoblographer: Talk to us about how you got into photography.

Angela: I used to mess around with disposable film cameras when I was in high school. The excitement of having them developed was analogous to opening presents on Christmas morning! I’ve had an on and off relationship with photography, but ever since the past year I’ve been practicing and learning a lot more.

What got you into food photography?

Angela: After my initial experiences with photography, I decided that I wanted to relive my experiences through photographic memories – this included travel, scenic and food. I’ve done a bit of everything but have stuck with food because it is what I’m passionate about when I talk to other people.

Phoblographer: These days, social media is the absolute biggest and best way for someone to market themselves as a photographer. You’ve used Instagram. Did you go in with a strategy and specific content ideas?

Angela: We initially used Instagram for its convenience as we found we were lacking in time to constantly write and update our food blog. It’s definitely an easier means to communicate with a larger audience, and we try to be as interactive as possible. It’s helped us touch base with other food bloggers and photographers which is rewarding in itself.

Phoblographer: How do you use Instagram to feed content and traffic back to the blog? Do you feel it’s an effective platform to do so?

Angela: We usually post a photo alerting our followers that we have a new post up on the blog, and also put a link to the latest post in our profile for easy user experience. We feel that whilst Instagram is effective to gather a social following by displaying our work, it is more difficult to feed traffic back into our blog.  People who use Instagram are majority phone users, and are not necessarily going to take time to read our blog posts.

Phoblographer: Talk to us about your following: who are they, what type of content do they like to see and how do you keep them satisfied?

Angela: It’s difficult to gauge our following as it seems we have a mixture of different cultures, countries and users. They are a smattering of chefs/cooks, food/drink establishments, food bloggers, photographers, and people who are just passionate about food. It’s great to see that some of our followers don’t even post food, which means we’ve managed to spark their interest.
We love varying our content, be it different meals throughout the day, a different colour scheme, sometimes vegan/vegetarian. We ourselves love diversity in food, so the variety we show is the variety we believe other people would enjoy too.

Phoblographer: The whole idea behind social media marketing as a photographer is being social with others. Do you guys collaborate with others to bring in more traffic or followers?

Angela: Our first collaborative giveaway was with a local cafe called Kin by Us. We initially did this out of curiosity and were lucky that Uel and Shannelle were so kind to collaborate with us! Our aim was to gain exposure for both ourselves and kin by us, but it also gave us an opportunity to thank our followers for supporting us. At that point, we had a following of a few thousand people, and it’s those who supported us from the start that we wanted to give back to.

We’ve also met a lot of other talented food bloggers – there is a network of bloggers who support and follow each other on Instagram.
 I think it is important to be social within the food community and it’s not solely for the purpose to gain followers or traffic. It’s an experience within itself, Instagram has allowed us to connect with like-minded people.

Phoblographer: How do you ladies get inspired and the ideas to create the images that you do?

Angela: There are many limits to being a food blogger/photographer – we try to take the best photo possible with the fastest time and least amount of disturbance to other customers. In saying that, many cafes have undergone some incredible design work which makes it easier to draw inspiration as to what style of photography to go for. My goal is to make the viewer want to eat what I’m eating.

Phoblographer: What are some of the absolute must-dos when creating content and images for Instagram?

Angela: Whenever we post process our work, we keep in mind that the audience may later see the food in real life, so we try to maintain the photos as close to the reality as possible – we’d like to think our viewers can trust us in that aspect.
With a food Instagram, it’s important to be interesting and informative as well as aesthetically appealing. There’s no fun in being just a pretty face!