YRSFood,
Restaurant & Menu Photographer.

YRSFood, food photographer. As a food photographer and photography studio, many of our food photography clients are restaurant owners. For them, their menu is their only weapon to beat off the high street competition.

They do not have huge budgets to decorate premises or market themselves. They are often known by a single reputation, word of mouth and have an extremely loyal customer base, spreading the word - that their menu is excellent and the chef's skill unique.

So bringing that experience to restaurant leaflets, menu cards, advertising features and anything else such as their website, is incredibly difficult as it is 'experience' driven. That's why we take a lot of care when taking photographs of menu subjects - how the food is styled, the colour pallet of the dish, the use of covers to lift the dish or promote a style of dining, the lighting of the dish - even the use of the tableware.

Menu photography. It's all about the plate... or is it?

A lot of menu photography is simply zoomed in shots of the plate contents. Fine if the dish being photographed is intricate but if your dish is chilli, the self levelling puddle in the middle of the plate just doesn't look good. So it's the angle of the plate that is of interest and if necessary pulling back and showing a little of the tableware to try and show a meal in action, may be a better option - so it's not just the plate when it comes to menu photography.

Then there is the issue of studio lighting for the restaurant image or would you prefer natural light... It's safe to say that food photography is not just about taking a photograph of the plate and this is often the mistake so many chefs make when they take images of their dishes themselves.

The plate needs dressing, the image styling and above all a little composition. Yes a vertical plate shot may work but only with perfect lighting - so on most occasions a more creative approach is needed and we find the best approach is a combination of two experts - the chef and the food photographer!

Restaurant Photography. Capturing the process of enjoying food.

This area of restaurant photography is very quickly moving to Facebook captured images - and it should do, as hiring a photographer all the while is impossible! People enjoying your establishment should be captured real-time and with real people. The only problem is that some of the images may be of poor quality due to lighting or the consumption of a few drinks!

That's why some of our clients bring us a long for the less busy times - lunch times perhaps not evenings - to engage with your customers and gently document the atmosphere.

A lot of the times, however, we suggest bringing in models to act the process. Why?

Model release forms (and now GDPR), to put a finer point on it. To get a close up image and not a crowd image that is professionally taken, requires a signed model release form, which gives you as the establishment owner their permission to use the image. So to get around that most clients use their staff, friends and even family to create a table level atmosphere which we photo-shoot.

YRSFood, Food Photographer.