Photographs of dishes — what sells and what puts people off

A dish with a photograph is ordered more often than a dish without one. That is why phone menus are worth having at all — on paper a photograph of every dish is impossible, on a screen it is normal.

The reverse is also true: a bad photograph does worse than no photograph. A dish without a picture the guest imagines. A dish photographed yellow under a lamp they have already seen, and already decided about.

Light settles everything else

One rule that does more work than any other: by a window, no flash, in daylight.

Daylight from the side gives form — you see the texture of the meat, the steam, the shine on the sauce. A phone flash comes from the front and flattens everything; it also throws a glare on the plate and a shadow behind it.

If you shoot in the evening while the place is open, the room lights are almost always warm and yellow. The dish comes out orange. Either shoot in daylight before opening, or use one white light source from the side.

The angle depends on the dish

• Straight down — for flat things: pizza, salad, a sharing board, pasta in a wide plate.
• At about 45 degrees — for things with height: a burger, a cake, a glass, a bowl.
• From the side, at table level — for drinks and anything with layers.

A pizza shot at 45 degrees looks like a circle that fell over. A burger shot from above looks like a bun.

Keep the background out of it

The commonest mistake is a busy background: a salt cellar, somebody else’s plate, a hand, a cloth, the edge of the next table. The eye goes there.

This works: a clean table, a plain surface, a board or stone. One or two props if they belong with the dish — a fork, a napkin, a glass of wine beside the main. No more.

A consistent frame beats a perfect frame

This is the difference between a menu that looks made and a menu that looks assembled.

Twenty good photographs, each from a different angle, on a different background, in different light, look worse than twenty average ones taken the same way. So shoot everything in one go, in one place, at one hour.

In practice: pick one corner of the table by the window, put down the same surface, and take them one after another. An afternoon is enough for a whole menu.

Cropping finishes the job — every photograph in the same ratio, the dish centred and the same size in the frame. In Ceres the cropping and rotation happen in place while you upload, precisely so that no other program has to be opened.

What not to do

Photographs from the internet. They show. The guest has seen the same burger in three other places and knows yours will not look like that. Someone else also owns that picture.

A photograph that promises more than the plate. If the portion in the picture is double, the guest who receives it is disappointed before tasting. That is the one photograph that genuinely costs you money.

Anything with flash. You have seen the result.

In short

One afternoon, by the window, before opening, the same angle for everything. That is enough for a menu that looks made by somebody, rather than assembled from whatever turned up.