Wix Restaurants | How to take great photos of your food with Andrew Scrivani

Welcome, everyone. I want to present myself. I am Shelley. I'm from the WIX Restaurants marketing team and I'm so excited to have you here today with us. In this session, you will learn about food photography within your restaurant in terms of lightning and props and plating and everything that surrounds it. We understand how important this topic is for you as restaurant owners, as business owners. Whether you're into showing your food online in terms of a menu on social media, or if you're more focused on selling online and getting more orders, this is very, very excited. And I'm even more excited to present to you Andrew Scrivani. Andrew is a leading photographer for the New York Times for over two decades now. It's a great honor to have him here. He is the author of the book that Photo Makes Me Hungry and the co founder member of thespeakeasy.com we're thrilled to have Andrew here and the tools that he's going to provide. You will surely help a lot in the way that you present your business online. Andrew, lead the way.

Hello, everyone from around the world. Amazing. I am so happy to be here today to talk to you about the importance of food photography to your businesses. It's such an essential aspect of what you do, what I do, and how those things marry and come together. So what I really want you to understand, I want to talk to you just for a few minutes about my experiences in working with restaurants and restaurateurs and why the lessons that I've learned in being a photographer for you. I'm going to share all of that experience with you today. Plus, we're going to go over there to my table in the room where no fewer than 10,000 images have been taken for the New York Times. In this room, I want to share with you some basic lighting techniques for daylight and using your phone. I want to share with you the best practices for propping some best practices for thinking about food styling. Obviously, as restaurateurs, you already know how to style food, but there are some differences between the plating for camera and plating for your restaurant diners. So there's a lot of things I want to cover today. I got a very short frame time to work with you. So the first thing I want to talk about is why it's essential for you as restaurateurs to have really, really good photos for websites, social media, any way you're reaching out to your customers. So it's a good first contact for a restaurant and makes a good first or you're actually contracting A photographer to come in and take pictures for you. Either way, they're always going to be super important. You know, visuals pique interest for particular dishes, for the tone and feel of your restaurant, the things that make people want to come and visit you. So that's a primary reason why good images are going to be sort of essential for you. It also helps create community. And I'm going to talk about this later when we talk about social media, but you know as well as I do that restaurants become the hub of communities. And when you bring people into that community, you want to be able to have the reach to get them, not just when they're coming into the restaurant, but just interacting with you, interacting with your staff through digital media. And that's really important for you as well, and sharing and networking. And this will also tie in to the idea of how we're going to reach out to our customer base. We are going to share both our experiences in the restaurant, the food that we're sharing in restaurants. Both we're going to share with our audience and our customers, and they're going to share with us and everyone else in that side of that community. Good visuals are the key aspect of that. And of course, web traffic equals actual traffic. So the more web traffic you get and the more presentation you put around the idea of your restaurant, the tone and feel of your restaurant, the more actual traffic walks through the front door. And I'll tell you a very quick story about an experience that good images does things like elevate your stature and makes you more marketable. So I took pictures this week of a man who makes DOSA in Washington Square Park. He ended up getting some very, very good images and some good traction online. And now he has a line around the park every single day. So the idea of getting more and more community built around you is because people eat with their eyes. People go first there, especially in the digital era, and they're going to be all on top of you when your food looks amazing. So that's really big part. Better picks equal better sales. So the idea is that if something looks amazing online, people are going to come into your restaurant and they're going to want to buy that thing. They're going to come to you for your signature dish. And the other part of it is people sometimes could be picky eaters and they want to become more familiar with a menu before they walk in the door and actually spend money in your restaurant. So the better your images are, the more indicative they are of your menu, the more familiar People can become with the things that you're serving in your restaurants. And of course, at the end of the day, this becomes the time when we have positive effects on orders, where everything around our visuals and piquing the interest, creating community, elevating the stature of your restaurant, letting people eat with their eyes, it creates a positive effect on the orders in the restaurant. And this is proven. So I want you to take everything that I'm saying today and think about all of the things that you've already been putting out in the world and the things that you aspire to put out in the world in terms of visuals for your restaurant. And then let's make really great pictures. So the first thing I want you to understand about taking your own pictures is you have to photograph with intention. What do I mean by that? Photographing with intention really means that you have to understand the subject matter that you're shooting and want to convey a particular message. So what does that mean for you? What that means really is that you have to know your best items. You have to know the things that sell best, you have to know the things that look best. And you have to understand how to transmit that message to your audience. And when you're doing that through photographs, you have to approach it with intention. The second thing you need to really understand is to know your messaging. Understand what you want to say with the images that you're creating. Do you want to say we're warm and homey? Do you want to say that we're casual? Do you want to say that we are fine dining? Know your messaging and make that come through when you are taking your pictures. And those things can be very subtle. You also have to understand and know your limitations. What is it about the space you're in, the camera you're using, the lighting that's available to you? How do you maximize all of those things to create the best pictures you can, even with your phone? We're going to talk about some of those things today. Also. Remember, the food has to be the star. This food has to be first, second, and third. When it comes to making pictures to show to your customer base. I understand that the room is important. Everything from the noise level to the music to the linen on the table is important. But nothing, nothing is more important in your business than your food. And how you transmit that, how you photograph that with the intention of making people understand that the food is the most important thing to you, makes the customer come into your place and and say, I understand that you care about what I eat. So the other thing I want you to remember is when you're taking pictures, intentionally taking pictures, understand how you're going to be used. Are they going to be used on the web? Are they going to be used for menus for Yelp or another sort of menu service for apps? How is that photo going to be used? All of those things are important because everything requires a different shape and size. And you want to make sure that you are attentive to that when you are making those pictures. So understand usage, how they're going to be used. And then finally, it's important to understand how to incorporate your branding into your photography. Now, what does that mean? It means the colors that you use in your restaurant, the lighting you use in your restaurant, the tone and feel of your dining room, the kind of props that you've chosen, all of these things are about the branding of your restaurant, not necessarily your logo, although there are times when that's appropriate. But everything else about your restaurant indicates the branding of your restaurant, meaning when people walk into the room, what are they met with? What does it feel like? What does it look like? And try to transmit that in the photographs as best you can. All of those things I are about photographing with intention. So that's my opening monologue. I'm glad that we got to that point because now we're going to get to the fun part because I want to bring you over to my table and we're going to talk about lighting. Sorry, I didn't mean to stop talking there. So we're going to go in to my phone right now and you're going to see what I'm going to see through the camera. So what I want to show you particularly is this plate. Now, this plate is being lit by this window with literally nothing on it. You could see it's a nice cloudy day, which is a really important aspect of this because we do not have to filter the light. But if we did have to filter the light, we're going to switch over, I want to switch you over to the other camera, the wide camera for a second. And you're going to see that something like this, which is just diffusion material, it's just like a plastic sheeting, this could also be white paper. That if it was a super sunny day in your restaurant where you have your table oriented with one directional lighting coming through the window, you can put this up in the window and that will diffuse the light and make it less harsh. Now, I know that the hard light look is something that everybody likes right now. So you have that option as well. You can also buy something in a store. This is called the flag. This can also go in your window and will diffuse the light nicely. But we're today because we have a nice overcast day. We don't have that problem. So let me go back to the camera, my phone, and I want to show you something very particular. So this light is one directional, meaning it's coming from my right, raking over my plate, and down into the left. What it is doing is creating this drop shadow right here. Now I'm going to use this to demonstrate why it's important to manage the light. Now this is perfect lighting right now because of the overcast sky. But let's just say I wanted our light to be a little bit darker. I mean, our, our shadow to be a little bit darker. So now I took this black card and I put it here. So now what it does is it creates a deeper shadow than what was there before. And you can see it's very subtle and you keep it out of frame. But it does create a little bit of a darker drop shadow, which gives it a little more drama. Now if I wanted that shadow to be lighter, I do something like this, which is a white card. Now I can come back to here and that shadow gets lighter, it gets less intense the closer I get with that. You can see just by rotating it. You could see how I change that. See, this is all practical lighting. And you use cards, both white and black, to make shadows deeper or eliminate them completely. So these are really basic lighting techniques. So let me just review a couple of things about lighting for you. You want to be one directional. Can we come to this? I want to speak to here? Yeah, you want to be one directional in your lighting. So basically what that means is the light coming through the window of your restaurant is going to be the perfect idea of one directional lighting. What you want to do is use things like white cards and black cards to create or eliminate shadows. So this is going to be really helpful for you. The other thing that you want to do is diffuse the light, like using things like a diffusion material or a flag to soften the light so that you don't get hard, hard shadows. And it also keeps the light nice and even over, over your, over your table. And then lastly, which is coming up first on my card because I'm out of order today, but that's okay, is you want to be able to shoot food in the orientation. So I talked about the one light, but I also didn't talk about where I'm positioned. Where I want you to be is either where the light is raking across the table, or I want you to be where the light is behind your subject. That's called backlighting. So if you can go to my phone camera for a second, you could look at that and you could see how a beautiful look you have there. Now I want to show you something. This is also really nice. Here's what you don't want. This look, two things are happening. Both it's flattening out the light, and what's happening is I'm blocking the light as well. So shooting in the same direction. Let's go back to a cam. Shooting in one direction with the food creates problems on a number of levels. So think about side lighting, back lighting, and not shooting in the same direction as you're not lighting in the same direction as you're shooting. And what. I'll give you a perfect example of what you should never do. Flash on camera. That flash on your phone camera is the worst thing you could possibly do to take pictures of food. If we are in a lighting situation that's really, really dark, like a dining room with candlelight or mood lighting, that is not the place to take pictures of your food. It's absolutely not the place. I know that there's a lot of questions about wanting to take pictures of food in dark dining rooms, but remember, photography is about lighting more than anything else. You need good lighting. This is the ideal scenario for you to shoot food effectively all the time, regardless of what camera you're using. So remember what I said about one directional light source and where you're oriented. If you only remembered those two things, your pictures are going to be that much better. So let me move on and talk to you about a little bit about propping and why proper propping. Proper propping is really important for your thing. Okay, so this. These are a few examples of things that I want to show you. We're going to look through my phone camera. I want to show you these dinner plates. So this is the plate I showed you the demo on. And this is roughly the same size as your average dinner plate. This is around the average size of a plate that I use for substituting for a dinner plate. It's effectually the size of a salad plate. I like to downsize the plates because what happens is when I want to get close to food like this, I have losing real estate on the plate to show the food. But when I bring in a smaller plate, I can actually continue to get that edge of the plate and get way more real estate in terms of how much food I can show and still show the edge of the plate. That's why I propped sizing down. The other thing that you'll notice about these plates and you'll notice about everything that I show you today. There's no shine on this. There's a couple of reasons for this. When you're in a dining room in particular, there's a lot of lighting overhead. It's going to be reflective off the plates. This is going to become problematic when you're trying to take nice pictures of food because you're going to have distractions of all these different reflections in your plates. So everything I use is matte or low shine. I also use neutral colors, gray, white, black. Another thing that I want you to remember about low shine is your silver. Now, you don't have to have, like, some places use vintage and some places use, you know, high shine things. But if you're really thinking about making good photos or having your diners make good photos, having low shine silver is a really, really good tip. It's going to really help. So I'm going to take these away for a second. We're going to go to the other camera. So the other thing I want to talk to you about is surfaces. So surprise. That is not marble. This is something that is lightweight. Knocking things over, lightweight and works really well. If you don't have a marble surface in your space and you want to shoot on something that looks marble, this and these things are available online. There's one called Poppy Bee. This is where this one came from. But there are many of them and they are really, really great. But traditional surfaces like you have in your dining area. So a marble surface, a really nice wood surface. And then this is a neutral gray. This is actually made out of zinc. Now, depending on the look of your restaurant, maybe any of these, all of these, or none of these are appropriate. But just understand that your surfaces is where the photography begins. It begins here and works its way up through the food to your lens. So remember that having these universal surfaces that kind of work in a lot of different ways will help. Now, if your tabletops are shiny, let's go back to the other lesson. Anything that's shiny in your restaurant is going to create distractions on the plate, on the photo, and going to be much more difficult to take pictures of. So as much as possible, low shine. Now, of course, some of you do linen on your tables. Linen is great because linen is low shine. And it's very neutral. So no matter what you do in terms of that, let the food be the star and everything's going to be great. Okay, I want to bring out some food because I want to talk a little bit about styling and what's important about styling for camera versus styling for diners. So, for example, this particular plate of spaghetti and meatballs has been styled for an over the top shot. So that means that I can photograph this from the top, knowing that the food stylist who is in the room with me right now was able to. She knew I was going to photograph this from the top. And she, she styled the food appropriately so that when I'm shooting it from the top, it looks great. Also notice my drop shadow that we talked about with the lighting. Notice the plate is low shine. So all of these things will enable me to take a picture which is going to look great and I can fill the whole frame and make a great picture of this. Now also remember, let's go back to this one. Remember when you're taking pictures of food that not always there's one. Not every angle is a good angle. So you have to remember to vary your angles, both in your public presentation of your food online, but also how you're going to approach taking them. You want to plate for the angle you're shooting. Like we just did. We plated for the top angle. But if I wanted to shoot this for another angle, I would want to plate it differently or at least try to shoot it differently. So let me show you. So if I come in here, I can still. I have something nice looking here and the architecture is still nice enough where I can still take a picture from the side lighting perspective. And I could swing around and go to that backlit perspective and it still looks good. But I might want to rotate that to get that one meatball in there tight and then maybe even get closer and pick up the edge of the bowl like I talked about and make those pictures. But you could see that light leaking in over the back. And that's what you really want with food, because what it does is it creates depth. Some of the other things I want to talk about in terms of food styling really quick, before we get on to shooting demo, there's a couple of things here that I'm going to put out on the table that I'm going to show you. When you're making food for camera, you want to do things very systematically and you want to have the ability to construct food the way you might in a restaurant. Setting, but also very deliberately so when we are. So we'll come back to here so you could see what I'm doing, all of these things. So when I made the spaghetti and meatballs, well, when Aya made the spaghetti and meatballs, she made the pasta ahead of time, cooled it, tossed it, and put it in this pan. She also made all of the component pieces of the burger that we're going to shoot in a little while. And also our garnish. Our garnish is already made, but hydrated. And I know that this is not specifically a food styling trick, but it's definitely something that restaurants are used to doing in terms of keeping everything hydrated. So all of this and then we construct it on the set. So a lot of times when we. I'm going to come back here. A lot of times when we're working with food, it becomes really apparent that the food has a short shelf life. So being able to kind of know what you're going to do in terms of building up your set. I picked my surface, I know what plate I want to be on, I know what props I want in the food. Get it all set up, check your lighting, and then construct the burger plate, the pasta and garnish and sauce once you are absolutely ready. Because garnish and garnish, wilts, sauce gets runny, you want to cheese or any other things that you're doing. So when we're doing the pasta dish, which I will bring back for one second, so we're doing this pasta dish, having this ready to go right before kind of keeps everything fresh. The other thing that's important is because we cooked the pasta before and it's not red hot and the sauce is not hot, it actually holds a little longer. So doing things a little bit differently for the camera versus for your diners is important. The last thing I want to talk about is your greens. Now, hydrating your greens is not something new for restaurants, but the reality is we do the same thing and keep everything super fresh and on ice until it goes on the plate. So this is really also an important aspect. Then, of course, food styling tricks in terms of oiling or misting or doing any of those things, those are the things that we do right at the end, right before we kind of start clicking pictures, because we want everything to look hydrated, we don't want the meats to look dry, and we want it all to feel like it's really fresh. So let me move on and do a little bit of a shooting demo for you. So that we have a good understanding of how to put all this stuff into practice in a very short period of time. So getting everything out of the way, we already photographed our pasta, but we can bring it back again because I might want to show you a little bit of what I normally do. And then we're gonna shoot this burger. So I know a lot of you serve burgers. It's a very popular item in a lot of places. I enjoy shooting burgers. So we have a very simple setup here. It's been out a little bit because we are working on the clock, but I'm gonna show you some of how we do this. So the burger has already been cooked. So we have the cheeses. Also. It's kind of got a little crispiness here. We have a really nice tomato, some onions and tomato, and then also some lettuce, which you can do it a number of different ways. For food styling, I like doing it either this way or putting it at the very bottom because you want to see all the layers. And then, of course, we're topping with our bun, and we're going to give it a little squeeze so we can see stuff. Now, you always want to start, like, kind of tweaking and playing around with what you got on your table and then giving it that little bit of a push now. Okay, now I'm going to do something here. I'll show you. This is kind of creating a little bit of a problem for me. So from a food styling perspective, I want this to sit a little bit nicer on top. So I may eat, eat. I may pick out some of this bread from the top of this bun and see if it sits a little bit better there. It does. See? So there's a tiny little trick. Now I got this nice knife that's sort of indicating I might wanna. I might wanna cut this burger. Or you can actually do one of those where you stick it in the top of the burger, if you like styling that way. But now I have a nice angle on an iconic kind of food item. And I'm side lit. I have low reflectivity, and I have the opportunity to shoot this from a number of different angles. Now it feels to me like this could be a little dark right here. So what I might do is go back to the earlier lesson when we talked about lighting. And I'm gonna bring up a fill card. I'm gonna open this up like a little book. This is made of foam core, but you can make them out of cardboard and painted cardboard. You could do a DIY you could also hold them up with these a clamps you can get at any hardware store. This is all really DIY kind of stuff. So when I use this card, it kind of gives me that fill right here. So now this is now all lit rather than in shadow. So you could see that very simply. If you like this look and you want there to be less mood and more lighting on your subject, then you can absolutely just do something that simple to make it that much better. Now, consequently, if I wanted to do this more dramatically and add to those shadows, what I would do is bring this dark card in even more and create more shadow there. So holding that and shooting there so there's that. That's with nothing. And then with. With the white light coming back. Now this is all side lit. Now, backlit is a whole nother situation because watch how dark this gets. Now we're gonna have to rotate and I'm gonna pull it toward me so I can de emphasize that window. So the angle. But you see that sharp highlight I have on the top of the bun because it's shiny. So not all buns are shiny like this. But of course, in this situation, we're gonna ignore that. So I'm just gonna angle myself a little differently. Now, of course, we can always put something behind. No. And then we can't do that because our light is coming from that direction. But I'm also getting. Because I'm in a studio and I need to be lit. You see this light that's happening right here, that's actually happening from this light behind me. So I'm gonna try to angle this in a way where I don't really see that to give you a better understanding of how to fill this light in. And I would bring this white card in and you could see that shadow there. You see how that shadow starts to disappear? See, the shadow is there on the left bottom. I bring in the card and it fills it in. So again, just a simple one directional light source. I'm gonna come up high and I got that nice bright shot. And then I take it away and I have a moodier shot. So we have a few different options in terms of both side lighting. So let's get a wider shot of me doing this so you can see exactly what I'm doing. So I'm going to put this down for a moment. So in the wide you could see on the table. I am directionally lighting is coming across from side to side because this is where my camera is going to be positioned. Now, if I want to add light. I'm coming in here for a subtract light. I'm going to use the black side, and I'm going to come in here. Now, of course, I want to go back to what I just talked about with that shiny thing on the top. Now, that's a good indication that I might need to filter that light. So by getting this in my window, I'm softening the light. I'm also making it a little bit darker overall. But because your cameras have such a really good low light capacity, that should be no problem. So we have a couple of shots of this, which I'm going to take a couple of more while we're here. I'm going to get a couple of more wider shots and tighter shots, and then I want to go over how processing them in your phone is also very easy and the things you should be looking for. So it's important to understand that inside, your phone also has these powerful. Inside, your phone has these really powerful programs that are within the. The nature of the thing that was built, right? You don't have to go to an outside app. Inside, your phone has a really good editing program. So here it is. Now, if you want to, let's say, start by cropping this photo, we're gonna crop into a square, because Instagram loves a square, right? Now, the first thing that I notice about this is I want my background to be darker, so I'm gonna go to my shadows first. And this is pretty typical in how I do things. And I want to drop out the back of that Now. I feel like I'm very contrasty and saturated now. If you like that look, that's great. But I particularly want to. I want to compensate for that. So I'm going to take the contrast down a little bit. So now I've achieved two things. I've taken the. The. I made the background darker, which I can do even more because the next thing I usually go to are my blacks. So the next thing I want to do is go to the blacks which are here and drop them out even further. So now it's getting even moodier again. My saturation seems very high in this, so I'm going to take some of that back just a little bit. And then I can also adjust for the vibrance, which is. It's very, very vibrant. Now, depending on what you like. It's all a matter of taste, but this is kind of getting to where I like it. Now. My overall highlights are a little bit high. You could see, like, when I push Them. And that's a good way to do this. You can push this until the highlights are really blown out and then pull it back to where it feels like it belongs there. Now we have spectral highlights on the ketchup. We have some spectral highlights on the top of the bun. If I go back to the overall exposure and pull it down just a little bit. Now we have an image that is better than what we started with, made with a phone, edited with a phone, only using daylight. So the idea of the things that we can accomplish. Now let's go back to our pasta pictures. Right? I wanted to go to the one of these pictures where I can crop in particular. So again, I made this picture. There's a lot of ancillary stuff left in the picture. And we can go again with the crop tool and get really close using the edges of the bowl. This is a little too much. So let's crop even more because we have the front edge. So that's nice. Then go. I want to first make this more dramatic, so I want to pull the shadows deeper. Then I want to go and add some black to make it a little more dramatic, just a tiny bit. And then go back to the exposure and then push it up a little bit. And we have all sorts of options in terms of I like the light temperature, but let's say the overall look of your restaurant is more warm because you have a lot of indoor lighting. You could always warm this up by making. By using this tool to make it a little more orange, like looking like tungsten or orange light or cooler, pulling it down, looking more like daylight, like what we have. So you have a lot of these really powerful tools in here to make really nice pictures with your phone. So I would recommend. Let's go back here. I would recommend those basic lessons, the things that we've been talking about in terms of basic propping, basic food styling, and looking for angles and also managing and manipulating the light to your advantage. All of those things are going to make your photography that much better. So once we have these photos, what are we doing with them? So let's talk a little bit more what I said in the opener. And we're going to talk about going to social media, which is effectually one of the primary ways in which we're reaching our customers. So what is it about social media that's so important for restaurants? First of all, it keeps your community growing. The more people you add to your Instagram feed or your Facebook page or any of the social media platforms, the more potential customers you have now people get very excited, especially when you interact with them. So let's say, for example, you have the opportunity to repost a picture, a nice picture that somebody made in your restaurant, and you have that interaction with them, they're going to be really excited that you reposted it, that you got, they got recognized by the restaurant. And on top of all of that, you're getting free advertising, you're creating community, you're building enthusiasm and excitement with your customer base and you're also getting free advertising in the process. So this is why quality imagery is really important. Because as that community grows and builds, because there's enthusiasm and excitement around your photography and the photography, maybe you're sharing from your customers. That social media component is an enormous aspect of your marketing plan. And it's all can be done either free or inexpensively. If you put a lot of focus and intention into what you're trying to do with your social media, that also. There's also another aspect to this too, and it's about making your restaurant better, is that the bigger that community gets and the more familiar and the more comfortable they are with communicating with you at the restaurant level through your social media, it gives you the opportunity for a lot of feedback. And customer feedback is what gives us the opportunity to make our products better. So it starts with great photography, but it goes all the way through our marketing plan and all the way down and into the idea of one to one customer feedback. And that's amazing. So think about that, because all of these things start with fantastic pictures. And whether you're taking them yourself, hiring a photographer to take them, or using customer generated income generated content, all of it serves the same purpose, to make your restaurant grow, be profitable, be popular and do really well. So this was the absolute cliff notes of this and I'm so happy that I was able to share this with you. I have the opportunity now to answer some of your questions that you've been putting in the chat and I'm going to do my best to answer every one of them. I know there's so many, but I think there's a lot of overlap so I should be able to handle that. And I'm going to let Shelley come back and we're going to start this Q and A.

Thank you, Andrew. This was so fascinating. Thank you for sharing all the knowledge. There are a lot of questions. I think the most frequent ones are about shooting desserts, pastries, cakes. What are the best practices to approach these kinds of dishes.

So you have to remember that A lot dark, like chocolate. So you have those two things that you have to contend with. Now the things that we talk about are dark. We want to be able to add light by using those white cards so that we could effectively push light back onto things. So, like, for example, in my book, I did an example of a stack of brownies and I shot it in daylight. And I showed what happens when you put the white card in, when you put a silver card in, or where you put a black card in. And you could see the differences in the lighting just by the reflection off the cards. So those things filtering your light and using those bounce cards to push light back on are going to help you with desserts because those are your two most common problems.

Super insightful. Thank you. Another question is a bit tricky. How do you approach food and. Or plates that are not looking the most attractive? Something like steak, something like torched and dark. How do you make it stand out and actually be as attractive as it should?

Well, I mean, in terms of meats, I mean, one of the things that we try to do with meats is not overcook them. Number one and number two, things like grill marks go a long way. Garnish goes a long way in terms of breaking up the idea that it's just one block of color. Now the idea of grill marks, you're all familiar with that. Diners love it. Cameras love it. The other thing, when it comes to, like, when talking about anything that's like monotone, like even a soup, like a bowl of brown soup, that simple act of garnishing, also breaking up the one solid color is a really good key, not only to the attractiveness to the diner, but also to the camera. The camera likes contrast. So the more contrast that you can build into the way you're presenting the food, the better it's going to be. On top of all the lighting things we talked about, on top of the idea of putting it on a, on a surface or a plate that doesn't have a lot of reflections and allowing it to step to the camera. So, like, if something really dark, you want to plate it on something light so that there's some difference between the plate and the food.

Thanks. We also got some questions about beverages or bottled dishes, something that is like. Or a beverage, soups, dishes that are served within a glass jar or container. How do you perceive this and turn this into an amazing photo?

Glassware photography is very, very difficult. So let me show you, for example, behind me, these black curtains. These black curtains go a really long way When I do beverage photography, because you got to remember something about reflective surfaces, particularly curved reflective surfaces. They are going to reflect everything that they see. So what you have to remember is give it something to look at other than the things you don't want it to see. So, for example, if I'm photographing a cocktail and I don't want it to reflect the other things in the room, what I want to do is surround it in black. And then what you could always do is add light back in a way that's intentional. So if you want to see a strip of white going down the side of the glass, put a white card next to it. All black, white card. What you're going to get is a nice edge around your glass, and you're going to get that white line, which shows where the light is coming from. So the idea of glassware, anything that's reflective, particularly doing cocktails and things that are in glasses, like desserts or soups, is you have to remember, take away the things that can reflect in the glassware by surrounding it with something that the glassware can look at. And black. So basically, you're blinding your glass. That's really what. Think of it that way. Let's put a blindfold on your glass, and that way it won't have anything else to look at when you're photographing it.

Amazing. This answer. So many people ask this. So great answer. So now I have a more general question. The dishes, the venue, the restaurant itself, it has its own atmosphere and life and spirit. How do you translate this experience, this atmosphere, through your pictures? How do you tell the story, your unique story of your business through a single image or just on your website, how do you transfer this experience within one picture?

Well, when you're talking about what we call a single image narrative, which is how do I tell the entire story with one picture? We're going to go back to something I said earlier in terms of understanding your messaging of the restaurant, understanding the lighting, understanding the propping or the decor of your restaurant. So, for example, a great place to start for a lot of you is your bar. The bar is really indicative quite often of the tone and feel of a restaurant.

And.

And if people have the opportunity to eat at your bar, that's a great place to start because it gives a great atmosphere to whatever is happening in your restaurant. It's usually that place that is sort of the home base of the restaurant. Now, if you do not have a bar, but your restaurant has a very particular decor, what you want to do is incorporate Those things into the photography as best you can. Now, moving from the single image narrative to a multiple image narrative, I want you to think in terms of a movie. There is a wide shot that we call an establishing shot. That's your dining room. Then we have a medium shot which might be a couple dining at a table. Then we have a close up shot which may be a food shot. And then we have an extreme close up which may be like what I did with those meatballs before really close to give the lusciousness or the or dessert to really, really build that enthusiasm and that hunger in people. So now what you've created is a cinematic look with your multiple image narrative. You have the wide, the medium, the tight and the extreme close up, just like in a movie. That's exactly how you should be selling your restaurant online.

And this is how you tell a story. Thanks. Another question that is about the experience. Okay, we're talking about dishes, like a steak, like a pizza, something steamy or sparkly or you know, melted cheese. How do you transfer this mouth watering experience through a photo?

Well, my experience has been getting close to it is that when you show food at an atypical angle, like most people don't look at their food that close, but when you put them there with the drip or the steam or the cut piece of meat that's perfectly cooked and you put it right in their face, they can't help but love the way that looks. That drippy piece of cheese, a runny egg yolk, all of that really up close really sells that idea that this is something desirable. So I would say the primary way and the way I got started in food photography and why I got really comfortable shooting up close was because that's also the simplest way to shoot. Because there's nothing else clouding your image. There's nothing else distracting. You know that that egg yolk drip is the only thing I want to photograph, so I want to be right there on top of it. Doing macro photography is the best way to sell desirability.

That's amazing. Another question that was raised, of course you experienced us and showed us exactly how to edit the pictures. And some important notes, Participants are asking, do you use the food filter or portrait mode or you just shoot it and go straight into editing? What is the best practice from you when you shoot this from your phone?

Well, I don't do any filters. I always shoot it in whatever the native, you know, color profile is for the camera. And then I adjust it in post production like I showed you the Portrait mode, it's definitely an option because it gives you that depth of field look that, that fuzzed out background look. But it only works in certain circumstances. Certainly it'll work from the, the architecture of shooting from this angle where you're shooting straight on, where the rest of the background will fall out of focus. It will not really work from the top angle in a way that makes any sense. It's going to look quite often looks kind of fake. So I think that you have to be really selective about when you use portrait mode. You also can't get super close with portrait mode, which is another problem with what I just said, is that if you're trying to do something very visceral or desirable, you want to get closer to it. Portrait mode might not let you do that. So, so I think it's a pick and choose kind of situation and you have to really judge with your eyes whether or not you like the way it looks, whether you think it looks artificial or not, and whether or not it's selling the image the way you want to.

Thanks. I guess we have time for another questions and then we can wrap up. But if you can summarize like the essence, the top essential things that every restaurant owner needs to have in terms of equipment or just backgrounds to use when, when they shoot their dishes. What are the must haves?

Yes. Well, the first thing I'm going to say is make sure you understand where the best light is in your restaurant and find that light, even it's really small, you only need a little bit of space. Have the find the best light in your restaurant. That's first. Second, understand how to filter and redirect lighting the way we did with the cards. That's second, really super important. And of course, you also want to know what angle you want to shoot things at. You want to understand how it's going to portray best coming from the kitchen to the camera. Understand that if you're shooting it from the top angle, you want to style it for the top angle. That's really important as well. And then finally, what you want to really understand about food photography is that every picture you take has to be the best one you ever took. That's what you have to remember and keep in the back of your mind because you want all of your photographs for your restaurant to be consistent. So if something doesn't look like it's up to your standard, edit it out. That's really important. Even if it's of an important dish, because you do not want to sell something to your customer that's not up to your standards. So the way your expediter looks at those plates before they go out to the dining room, you have to look at every single photo. The way you take. You have to look at every single photo you take the same way, like the expediter before he lets it out onto the floor.

That's great. Thank you so much, Andrew. It was a pleasure having you. You shared so much knowledge, and I'm sure we're going to scroll.