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
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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.