Food Photography

We like to mix it up. In recent years most of our advertising and commercial photography work has been producing lifestyle images for stock libraries and commissioning clients. While food photography is usually left to the very specialised market of food photographers in London, we love taking on work in other areas depending on the brief.

Norfolk based restaurant Butlers in Holt recently added the well established traditional restaurant Tatlers in Tombland Norwich to its expanding portfolio. With new owners often come new ideas and concepts. The new team wished to keep the traditional look of the restaurant but also to modernise the menu in the hope of attracting a broader audience.

London based design company Design Spy approached us with the brief to see what we thought. After a meeting with an agreed shot list we allocated two days to shoot at both restaurants. All the food photography was shot at Tatlers Norwich using the restaurant as a backdrop. The lifestyle images were shot at both restaurants.

When shooting food in the past I have always found it best to have two dishes for each shot. One to set up your composition and lighting with and another fresh dish as identical to the first one as possible to shoot with. Under the heat of the lights, food changes very quickly. The fat on meat for example starts to look cold very quickly. So the fresher the food and the quicker you shoot the better.

Regarding lighting we shot lunchtime dishes and evening dishes. The lunchtime images we kept bright and fresh using a lot of local window light and a small amount of fill light for the shadow areas. To create a contrast for the evening images we used a warmed up key flash light to imply the warm light you would get from a candle or a log fire. For the shadows we used a soft cooler light. I like to use Lee filters for this, which you can buy in large plastic rolls and cut to size as you wish. The mixture of filters not only gives the food a more 3d look but also brings it to life and makes it look much more like advertising photography. A paintbrush and a pair of tweezers are also very handy for moving food around on the plate.

Samples of the food photography shoot are shown here as well as a link to the website for further examples. http://www.butlersrestaurants.com/
www.designspy.co.uk