Preparing a restaurant photo shoot: what should be ready the day before

Across a day in a restaurant, the shooting itself takes up a fraction of the time. The rest goes into decisions: hunting for a plate that is out of stock, moving a table away from a reflection, waiting for a dish to come back because the first one got served.

None of those minutes are lost through carelessness. They are lost because the question comes up at the most expensive moment of the day, when everybody is on their feet. The same question, asked the evening before by message, costs nobody anything.

That is the only reason this page exists. There is nothing here a restaurateur cannot settle alone in twenty minutes, and those twenty minutes make a real difference to the result.

The images will not be looked at one at a time. They will go out as a series: an online menu, a feed, a press pack. A series holds together through what repeats inside it, and tableware is what repeats most.

Pulling out three or four pieces and sticking to them beats opening the whole cupboard. What matters is not that each piece is beautiful on its own, it is that they resemble each other enough for ten photographs to look like one place.

Two concrete traps. A plate with a wide white rim loses half its surface the moment you crop to vertical, and most uses are vertical now. A very glossy plate mirrors the ceiling, which means the downlights, which means a highlight that has to be worked around on set.

A hot dish holds for a few minutes under built light. After that the sauce sets, the steam stops, the greens turn. You can work fast; you cannot work against that.

The answer is not to rush, it is to double up. A first plate is there to set the frame, the light and the height; it can be handled, moved, ruined. The second arrives plated at the last moment and stays only as long as the useful frames take.

For the kitchen that means allowing for the quantities. It is the only genuine material cost of a shoot day, and it is small next to the time it saves.

Room shots need a room with nobody in it, or with the people you have chosen. In a working restaurant that leaves two windows: before lunch service, and the afternoon lull.

Both need booking like anything else. Placing them in advance avoids the familiar end-of-day scene where seated guests are asked to shuffle out of frame.

The second window has an advantage the first does not: mid-afternoon light comes in lower and reaches further into the room. When there is a choice, that is usually the one to take.

The brief almost always arrives as “we would like the menu covered”. It rarely is what is needed. Twenty dishes shot back to back give twenty average images; eight chosen dishes give eight that work.

The order matters as much as the selection. Anything fragile — frozen, foamed, fried, or built on the plate — goes first, while the rhythm is good. Stable pieces go at the end of the session.

I ask for that list beforehand and go through it with the kitchen. What belongs on it depends on what the images have to do: an online menu, a press pack and a social feed do not call for the same dishes. It is also what decides a quote, and that is set out on the pricing page.

The equipment need comes down to two lines. An accessible socket, and a square metre of flat surface that is not a thoroughfare: a service table at the end of the room, a corner of the bar, a side station.

That square metre keeps the gear off the floor of a corridor where plates are being carried. It is trivial, it never gets asked for, and it is what makes a day run calmly or not.