5 tips for Food Photography for restaurants

Client
Photography Advice

Services
Content Creation, Food styling, Studio Production

Year
2023

Top five tips on ways to improve your food photography pictures for your websites and social media.

Your dishes have a distinct style & taste, food photography can help showcase your dishes to whet your customers’ appetite, order more and drive footfall to your restaurant.  

Having the right images for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and not forgetting your website, flyers and menus can give you the upper hand in the marketing of your restaurant. In a highly saturated marketplace, it is as important as ever to be one step ahead of the competition and catch the eye and palettes of your ideal diner, and this is where good photography and beautifully curated images of your dishes, photos of your team and restaurant come to play.   

Websites, newspapers,  flyers and blog posts with great photos complement and enhance what is written, and advertising creatives have always combined written content with a great photo to maximise the impact of the story and allow people to recall the message and image for longer… With your food that makes perfect sense.  Let’s say for example you are doing a new flyer, and only write you sell tandoori chicken, the uptake may not be as good as it would be if you added a mouth-watering picture of the chicken as it comes out of the tandoor. Food photography is an essential part of your communication with your diners and you need to wow them on their first visit, they say you eat with your eyes first,  so here are the top 5 tips to get your images perfect and ready to tantalise the taste buds.

Take your time. Don’t just rush to put up a blurry photo from a mobile phone, or a photo where the lighting is bad, or the styling does not reflect your restaurant brand.  Make sure the picture does the dish and your chef justice. 

Highlight Dishes let customers know which one of your dishes is the best seller, chefs specials, or your speciality dishes, these images can be changed weekly or seasonally depending on your menu rotation, and also gives you a way to promote the dishes you want the customers to eat.
Use Good lighting to get the best out of your dishes get as much natural light as possible, which for some restaurants can be quite a challenge. Try positioning the dish on at table by a diffused window and always use a tripod.
Props.  The food is always the star, but by adding a couple of props here and there will make the dish pop and allow you to create a brand for your images.

Take more than one shot. Creating a great photograph takes time and you won’t get it by taking one shot. Try taking a few shots from different angles and a combination of viewpoints.

With these top tips, you should be well on your way to serving fresh food photography on your websites and social media networks.
To find out what else you can do to get great images on your website get in touch here.

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