The challenge: Photographing your work can be daunting. At the start of the process, it is important to create a cohesive look that aligns with your business identity and is consistent in its visual messaging. Your visual identity should reflect who you are, the product you make, and the venue in which it is served. In most cases, the venue, featured art and fittings, lighting, and ambience are the biggest determiners of what lighting and photography will work best. This style guide is designed to simplify the process so that, as the client, you can begin to have a fair and reasonable conception of what the final images will look like and have a level of control over their outcome; they are, after all, your images.
This style guide will highlight key features of 5 different aesthetic styles, their key characteristics, and the environments they work best in to help achieve an optimised workflow and get the most from your photo session.
These styles are broad, and each can have cross-over elements with other styles. They guide you, the client, to help you achieve what you’d like from your session and begin preparing for the day.
Light and bright:
Light and airy food photography emphasizes freshness and delicacy, often showcasing dishes with a sense of elegance and simplicity. This style works well with pastel colours, soft whites, and muted tones, which enhance the food's natural appeal. Natural lighting, exceptionally smooth, diffused or daylight, complements this style, creating gentle shadows and a bright, clean aesthetic. It favours fine dining and upscale casual restaurants, where presentation and subtlety are essential, allowing the intricate details and textures of the food to shine through.
What does it play nicely with?
Venues with colour-blocked tablecloths in neutral or earth-toned hues, off-white, neutral or earth-toned crockery, significant natural/neutral light sources and breakfast and lunch menus which require a less dramatic image. The light and bright style is featured heavily in lifestyle media. Therefore, It is a style people are very familiar with. It has a relaxing and meditative sense to it.
Dark and ambient:
Dark and moody food photography highlights richness and depth, often creating a dramatic and sophisticated atmosphere. This style works well with deep, shaded colours, which add intensity and contrast to the images. Low or tungsten lighting complemented it, with intense directional light and deep, elongated shadows, emphasizing textures and contours. This approach favours gourmet and rustic restaurants, focusing on hearty, flavorful dishes and a cosy, intimate dining experience.
What does it play nicely with?
Venues that use natural materials such as concrete, stone, dark wood, brass and stoneware-style crockery. It is ideal for venues that are tucked away and lack multiple windows; make use of booth seating and tungsten lights. The dark and ambient style brings more drama and a sense of intrigue, and it is well-suited to nighttime-only venues and cocktail bars. The dark and ambient style features heavily in suspense, drama television shows, and Renaissance art, a style with which viewers are very familiar.
Bold and saturated:
Bold and saturated food photography brings vibrancy and detail to dishes and adds an editorial element. This style works well with bold, intense colours and patterns, which create a lively and dynamic look. Often using hard light, this approach emphasizes sharp edges and strong contrasts with shadows, adding a graphic quality to the images. It favours trendy and casual dining establishments, focusing on playful, eye-catching presentations and a fun, energetic dining experience.
What does it play nicely with?
Venues that feature undiffused or strong light sources with modern or retro lux interiors.
It can be particularly striking with menu designs that feature glazed and glossy menu items such as Chinese food, glazed pastries, or caviar services. The use of hard and specular light favours food with high detail, but that also is its warning. It will capture a lot of detail, making some food look “too busy.” The bold and saturated style and aesthetic are used in haute couture fashion publications. It is present on any sunny day without clouds, making it a familiar look people have seen many times.
Cinetone:
Cinematic food photography infuses images with a movie-like quality, creating a sense of drama and narrative. This style works well with curated, balanced colours enhanced by meticulous colour grading, often incorporating atmospheric elements like haze and lens flare for added depth and mood. Controlled lighting, with a careful mix of highlights and shadows, brings the images a polished, artistic feel. It favours high-end and concept restaurants, where the dining experience is crafted with a storytelling approach, highlighting the artistry and creativity behind each dish.
What does it play nicely with?
Venues with a purposefully curated colour swatch, architectural designs, logo, and branding assets. Achieving the complete cinematic aesthetic also favours landscape orientation images that are wider than high. Overall, it produces a more stylised image where colours lean towards being slightly muted, with a reduced colour range, colour grading, and colour tinting to aspects of the image that embrace an established colour swatch or branding. Cinetone, or the cinematic aesthetic, is primarily used in cinema, Netflix and increasingly on YouTube, making it a style that many viewers are already well adjusted to.
Rec 709 standard:
The Rec. 709 standard in food photography ensures faithful colour reproduction and accurate skin tones, making it ideal for realistic and true-to-life images. This style captures vibrant yet natural colours with moderate contrast, maintaining a balanced look that avoids extremes. It adds overall consistency, ensuring that the appearance of dishes remains uniform across various lighting conditions and platforms. Favoured by a wide range of restaurants (And photographers.) from casual to fine dining, this approach highlights the authentic beauty of food while preserving its integrity and appeal.
What does it play nicely with?
The Rec. 709 style works well in various environments because it emphasises natural, faithful colour reproduction and consistency. It is ideal for environments with controlled lighting, such as professional studios, where uniformity and accuracy are paramount. Additionally, it suits well-lit, modern dining spaces and kitchens, ensuring that the vibrant yet true-to-life colours of the food are captured accurately. This style is also effective in outdoor settings with natural light, providing a balanced and realistic portrayal of dishes. People have likely seen Rec. 709 on display many times in their day-to-day lives on HD televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices, as it is the standard for most broadcast content. What it forgoes in colour grading and specific lighting conditions, it makes up for in reliability.
