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Restaurant/food promo photography - any tips?
I'm going to be doing some marketing photography for a friend's
restaurant soon, & I thought there'd probably be plenty of people here who could offer advice, tips & 'gotchas' for this sort of work. The kinds of subjects I'll be doing include a couple of modelled shots of people at a table, some food shots & some decor shots. Would anyone care to offer advice on getting the best results? (Bonus points for tips on cheaper/faster methods. -- W . | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because \|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est ---^----^--------------------------------------------------------------- |
#2
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Restaurant/food promo photography - any tips?
I'm going to be doing some marketing photography for a friend's restaurant soon, & I thought there'd probably be plenty of people here who could offer advice, tips & 'gotchas' for this sort of work. The kinds of subjects I'll be doing include a couple of modelled shots of people at a table, some food shots & some decor shots. Would anyone care to offer advice on getting the best results? (Bonus points for tips on cheaper/faster methods. If this is a photo of a couple sitting at a table for advertising and rack cards/brochures then its fairly simple. but it is one of those jobs that seems to combine different and opposing skills, people photography and interior architecture are two very different things. and if its a view restaurant then the problems and equipment requirements escalate. On the easy side, you need to do simple shutter drag to capture the background ambient light. Use a couple slave flash to rim light the models and put a highlight on the food. The mix of daylight temp flash on the subjects and warm tungsten on the background will often work for you, OTOH the interior designer and/or corporate freak out at the colors they chose are ... different. I would use a wide lens if you can get the background in a compositional way and not show anything uncomplimentary, or a semi long lens and only get one area of decor as the background. If doing the wide, see if you can get the owners and others to sit in some chairs as if the place was busy, its always been obvious to me that the happy couple are models when the whole place is empty. If the shot is supposed to feature the food, then have the owners stand behind a booth with lots of plates on the table, they can hold a bottle of wine, or a tray of desserts. sometimes you have to go out of your way to crop out the ceiling I guess some owners that do it themselves never look up cause they are too concerned looking down at the food, but if so, it helps to have a foreground to take up the space, say that tray of desserts. windows, especially the view places, means that you have to have a lot of flash power to bring the ambient light, and your subject lights, to one stop under the out side. You want the outside to be one stop over, just enough to brighten, yet still retain enough detail to recognize the landmark, but not enough to wash it out badly. Having a window scene the same density as the interior gives you a look of a billboard or one of those scenic wallpapers, a photo cut and pasted in. one of my big fiascos was a restaurant shot, it started out simple enough, two people sitting with wine glasses, lobsters, but then, they are in a marina, right, so the guy got a brilliant idea of having a sailboat....You know, sailboats do not have full sails up IN THE MARINA, and its not as matter of taste, class nor style, a sailboat can move really freakn fast. We're showing up with our gear, and they are already sitting in the boat, having to get out of everybody's way who were trying to move in or out. The point of that wasn't keep it simple, the point is that people who didn't go to the professional with a portfolio of food shots, interior shots etc, will throw things at you trying to get away with as much as possible for as cheap as possible. food shots is one of the more complicated specialties, there are people who make a living as a food stylist, those big fancy spreads in the gourmet magazines, the stylist is probably making as much as the photog. so much stuff doesn't photograph as well as they look, get the lighting on one thing right and the other thing looks dry, or greasy, or dull. Stuff melts while waiting. they use plastic ice cubes and there are specific reasons there are round cubes and square. If its like chinese food, have them make it very dry, little oil, you can brush some oil on to make something shine. Have one of those pastry blow torches to put a little sizzle on something. Have stand ins, they should cook one dish of everything to set up, and then whip out another whole set to quickly replace, nice and fresh, brush a bit of oil here and there, shoot. gives a much better reference to eating your mistakes. but basically, off camera flash, a big softbox on the side about 45' or even bounce flash off a sidewall, slow shutter to let the background build up to one stop under, use the available interior lighting to help your effects, the downlight for a hair light or add a glow to the table, use a slaved flash for a rim light or kick, place it opposite from the key light. |
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