Pictures that make you hungry

What makes you want to cook a recipe? More often than not it’s the leap-off-the-page, good-enough-to-lick photo that draws you in, followed by an enticing recipe title. When both capture your cook’s imagination and set your tastebuds tingling, that’s the prompt to dive into reading the recipe itself. Quite simply, it’s food porn, and there’s a lot of it in delicious. magazine.

If you see a story about a food producer, whether in print or online, a picture capturing the essence of the person’s life – sometimes gritty, sometimes beautiful, sometimes inspiring (or all three) – intrigues you and tempts you to read.

The Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Awards honour the best in food photography – recipe shots, pictures of ingredients and striking images of people around the world making and producing the food we love to eat. Chair of Judges Jay Rayner commented: “What this year’s images represented was the kind of appetite that makes a hungry man like me happy.”

There were more than 6,000 entries to the 2014 awards, so competition was tough. But one image, by Yorkshire-based photographer Tessa Bunney, winner of the Philip Harben Award for Food in Action, stood out to the judges as the supreme champion. The shot depicts a woman in Laos making noodles by hand, and captures extraordinary light and movement. See the champion picture below, then read on to see the winning shots for each category – they’re an inspirational bunch…