Food Photography: The Spoon's 2019 Menu

Get ready for a big blog post with about 41 photographs of food photography! I photographed The Spoon Café’s new 2019 menu two weeks ago. This menu will go live the first week of January 2019. They will feature quite a few new menu items.

Apple Pecan Oatmeal

All of these food photos were shot with the same lighting setup. I bought a table top from IKEA a few years ago, and we have used this for the same background for each menu shoot. We had a two light setup for this shoot. And we photographed everything in about two and a half hours. The staff made the meals and depending on the dish, I would be the food stylist and rearrange the items so it looked it’s best.

Apricot Glazed Salmon

Ideally, we would food style each dish from the ground up, but with a limited budget and limited time, we do just enough to make things look great. With more time we would be using tweezers, filler, pins, and needles to get everything in the perfect location. We would be using vegetable oil and glycerin spray to make things look more shiny. There are so many tricks.

Artichoke Pesto Griller

These food photos will be used in a touch screen kiosk for the ordering system. Customers will be able to identify menu items using the photo and a title. So the photo is crucial to sell the menu items.

Bacon Wrapped Turkey Meatloaf

All of these photos are very commercial. Yes, food photography can be artsy and editorial, but often we need good simple photos to sell the menu.

Bali Blessings

For the photo shoot, I shot tethered to a laptop computer so the head chef could review the items in the square format and see if things looked perfect. Commercial photography loves tethered shooting!