Restaurant and food photography

Ten to fifteen dishes fit into three hours if the kitchen plates them in sequence and somebody senior is present to make decisions quickly. The constraint is never the camera. Ice cream gives you about ninety seconds. A dressed salad has roughly five minutes before it collapses. A braise will hold for most of an hour. Sequencing the shoot around those timings, rather than around the menu order, is the difference between fifteen dishes and nine.

There is no need to close. These sessions are shot between services, typically mid-afternoon, using a corner table or a section of the pass — the room photographs better empty anyway, and the kitchen can plate to camera rather than to a ticket. Thirty retouched photographs are delivered within five business days, cropped for the delivery platforms, the menu and social, which have three different aspect ratios and three different amounts of room for a logo.

Plate to camera rather than to the guest. A dish built for a diner is centred and symmetrical; a dish built for a photograph is pushed off-centre with height on one side and a clean edge on the other, and it uses about twenty per cent less on the plate. A chef who understands that distinction gets a better gallery from the same three hours, and it is worth five minutes of conversation before the first dish leaves the pass.

The room matters as much as the plates, and it is the half most restaurants forget to ask for. A delivery-platform listing needs dishes; a website and a reservation page need the room, the bar at dusk, hands working, a table being laid. The brief covers both by default. From $650, with a commercial licence for your own marketing.