Plating Photos
What's the difference between eating in and eating out, other than someone else does the cooking and clean up? One major difference is how the food is served. Even the simplest restaurant will add some garnish, such as an orange slice or parsley, to a dish. The fancier restaurants can take food presentation to an art form, a process known as plating. They don't do this to be froufrou or in order to charge you an additional 20 bucks. They do so for practical reasons: to heat plates for hot food or cool them for cold; to keep foods that should be separate apart; to add flavor in a controlled manner, such as placing raspberry sauce under a slice of fudge cake.

Figure 4-14. Layout with two rows of photos, with spacing and layout controlled by CSS
For the most part, though, the reason that good cooks plate their presentations is to enhance the experience—to ensure that the diner experiences the food with as many senses as possible.
This process of plating can also be applied to photographs. Too often we put a photo into a page and other than a border or drop shadow, we ignore everything else about it and around it. Adding a photo into a story is an opportunity to not only embellish the story, but also to indulge your creativity when preparing the photo.
Thanks to digital cameras and the advances made in technology to manage photos, publishing pictures online has become the new ...