9 Restaurant photography tips for i-phone
Take Staff Portraits
People want to know the people behind the food. The cooks, the baristas, the waiters. These are your heros. These portraits help tell your story and build trust with your potential clientele.
Your iphone is fine for this. Use portrait mode and stand about 4-6 feet away, and focus mainly on the face. This can be a traditional smiling portrait or a natural snapshot when they’re working or having fun playing around.
If the light is difficult in your restaurant, go outside. Bright cloudy days are these easiest to photograph people, because you won’t have to deal with so many shadows.
Food, drinks and other products.
For the food use regular mode if you want everything to be sharp. Make sure nothing but the plate is on the table. Clean up any distractions like napkins or other things unless you want them to be in the picture.
Clean up the plate. It's easy to leave little rice kernels, crumbs or sauce on the side where it looks messy, so just wipe down the edges with a paper towel.
Get a small phone tripod This is the only gear suggestion I'll make here. For photographing your food and products, it’s going to make it stable with the sharpest picture you can get even when the light is dim inside.
Try to get different angles. If you always shoot from above your plate, try from the side. Try an overhead shot of the table like those fancy chef shows. You might need to stand on a chair, but these shots are worth going the extra mile.
Edit. Much commercial photography isnt heavily edited, just bright and colorful. Just go very easy on the vibrance and saturation, adjust black control to the right for just a little bit of subtle contrast and then make it a little bit brighter with brilliance and exposure.
The iPhone can give a decent shot in-camera, without a filter, so keep the edits small. It’s easy to get excited on an edit and go too much, so often I go back afterwords and tone down the edits. This is for you to decide, but get opinions of your coworkers if your not sure.
Build trust without too much clutter. Don’t go overboard with prices and shoutouts on the photos. Showcase the food and build trust on social media, not everything is sell, sell, sell.
But of course you do need to make sales, so this is up to the business to decide. Gary V has a great resource for this, called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.
Practice. The iPhone is a great, easy-to-use camera, but the user will always benefit from practice. So the assignment to you is, take a food picture every day.
Taken with an iPhone at El Amigos in the Hawthorne area in West LA. The iPhone did a great job, except one mistake, I left the plastic fork in! lol. Practice to avoid these kind of mistakes. Even if you can clean it up in Photoshop, wouldn’t it be easier to just remove the plastic in the shot?
Yes, shooting all your food might be a little annoying to your family, but how else do you learn? Take a look and compare it to your favorites on Instagram or wherever else. Find out what you don’t like in the picture and change it improving as you go.
Behind-the-scenes
These are photos and videos about how your restaurant is run, someone grinding coffee, cooking a dramatic stir-fry, or just taking a break and goofing around. This is very interesting to see for people and builds trust on social media.
Last, but not least:
Hire a restaurant photographer. You can get by with just a phone, true enough, but if you want that extra professional look for your website or printed material, I’m happy to help.
Check out my small business portfolio if you want to see more. Good luck!
