The exciting job of capturing a restaurant includes many elements of architecture, design, consumer experience, and leisure.
We no longer focus on just the space, but we must take into consideration that food and beverage and be done in any space including your home, its crucial to include all the elements that take people out of their home to eat, drink and enjoy a great hospitality experience and includes the mood and feel, design and art.
Table of Contents
Planing a Successful Restaurant Photoshoot
Talk to the Designer, depending on who is the client, working with a restaurant interior designer always requires seeing the floor plan layout and getting the designer brief on the look and feel of the space.
Understanding the vibe and atmosphere is crucial for creating the right type of pictures that connects the culinary experience to the design.
After understanding the layout of the space, concept, design, and use of materials we can plan better the type of images, angles, and lighting for the photoshoot.
Talk to the People
Beyond the design, a good restaurant always has a background story. Food, material, and history takes an important part in planning a successful photo shoot.
Setting the Schedule
After understanding the design and culinary experience, the layout, and the theme, we will need to see what angles are best to deliver the story to the viewers and guests.
We usually capture them after closing when the space is clean and staged or several hours prior to opening.
Depending on the size, it can take between 3-6 hours to produce those 5-8 impactful images.
Restaurant Photography Process
Every successful project starts with scouting the space. After we complied the shoot list we start with the main spaces that are the most complex to do (typically the larger spaces).
Working with studio lighting crafting the direction of light is a key feature for impressive and impeccable photos.
Tip: It’s crucial to stage the restaurant to the smallest detail possible, as retouching 100 glasses, silverware or any other missing or wrong element is almost impossible or not cost-efficient.
Make sure your project is time-proof removing any elements pointing to current times, like “sales” or “promotion” signs.
Post-production
In post-production (editing) we will take dozens of images from each angle, crafting them together to bring all the details and atmosphere to a single polished image.
Leveraging photos to generate revenue
Every successful restaurant knows how to leverage those images to generate revenue! Revenue is the key work when a business uses a professional architectural and interior design photographer for their spaces.
It’s much more than Social media likes! Competitions, awards, publication, website, billboards, and advertising. All of these elements will fully utilize the benefits of high-end visuals.
One thing that always surprises me, is when I hear how proud the involved people are about how much money and time it took to achieve those amazing results, but no one knows about how much time and effort was put into a project unless the images reflect them.
The pictures in this article are of Jade Restaurant in J.W Marriott
In this project, we had the pleasure of working with Tandem Design.
