Creating Quality Food and Drink Photos Your Bar
You will often hear that people eat first with their eyes, and today, when many of your potential guests are going to come into contact with your brand digitally before ever coming in the door, it is more important than ever that you have high-quality photos of your food and drinks that drive guests into your door.
There are lots of tips and tricks to making great photos of your food and beverages, but the main thing to always remember is that you need to show off your product and establishment in the best possible light (both literally and figuratively). Most bars are posting hastily taken photos that don’t make their food look great and are not driving sales. You need a strategy when creating content. It will make you stand out from the crowd when guests search for your bar online.
Food and Drink Photography
Regardless of what you are photographing, cocktails, beer, or food, there are some general photography tips and rules to keep in mind. By getting the basics right, you ensure that you are putting out the best possible content for your bar, and simplifying your content creation strategy. The good news is that you don’t need an expensive DSLR camera and professional lighting. If you have a relatively new smartphone, you can get a high-enough quality picture. But that doesn’t mean you can just snap any old photo off of your phone and expect it to work. Just like everything else in your bar, you need a strategy.
Get Your Background Right
One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of bars make when it comes to taking pictures of food or beverages is taking a picture that is of more than just a plate or a cocktail. For a great photo of a cocktail or plate of food, that is all that you need in the shot. There is no reason to include a lot of background. One great way to do this is to blur out the background and have the focus only on your cocktail. You could do this with a fancy lens, but plenty of free, or inexpensive, photo editing programs will allow you do to this right from your phone. It’s a great way to make sure the background doesn’t distract from your product.
Another way to handle your background is to have it more in focus and strategically place items in the background to enhance the shot and tell more of a story about your cocktail, or food. This could be anything from your bar to ingredients you use in cocktail or food items, to bartending tools, or even your bartender making the drink.
Framing the Shot
Whether you are photographing food, beer, or cocktails, you should consider just what is in the frame and where the food or drink is located in the picture. One basic tennent of photography is the rule of thirds. Think about your shot as a 3X3 grid, with both the verticle and horizontal axis broken into equal thirds. Generally, photographs are more interesting when the main subject is not directly in the middle third, and is either towards the left or right third, with some open space in the remaining thirds. While this is not required if you are doing a close-up shot of a single product, if you are putting together a shot with background props or showing action, you should keep it in mind.
Another consideration when framing your shot is what should the angle of the camera be to the subject you are photographing. Naturally, it depends on the subject. If you are photographing a beer or a cocktail, you almost always want a direct shot from the side or a 45-degree angle. This way you see the entire glass, and communicate a feel for the drink and the presentation. The best option for food is usually either directly from the side, like a cocktail, if the food has height, or from directly above if the food is flat. For example, you would photograph a burger from the side, and a pizza from above. You can do any angle in between, but these two tend to get the best results the easiest.
The main thing to remember is that regardless of how you are framing your shot, the exact angle, or anything else, you need pictures that make people’s mouths water. You need to show your guests just how amazing what you offer is. Give them a reason to want to come in.
Lighting To Make Food and Drinks Pop
Lighting is one of the most important factors when it comes to producing an amazing photo. You want to avoid too many shadows and at the same time, you want to avoid pictures that have lighting that is too cool (think industrial fluorescent lighting, whereas old incandescent bulbs are much warmer). If you can get naturally defused soft lighting, that is always the best. Think of using a table right in front of your window when the sun is not beating straight through it, but letting in a lot of soft light. However, many of us in the bar business don’t have a lot of windows in our establishments and don’t work when it is sunny.
There are plenty of low-cost options on Amazon or other sites for good-quality lighting. Again you do not need expensive professional lighting. Most of the lighting targeted at influencers will work perfectly for food. Look for ones that allow you to change the brightness and warmth of the LED lighting so that you can always optimize your lighting based on the ambient light. You may want to consider buying more than one light. You want to avoid harsh shadows in your photography. If you use two lights, both 45 degrees from the angle of the camera, you can minimize shadows and make sure that your food or drinks shine.
One final tip, do not use your flash. While a flash is going to provide a lot of light, it is harsh light that is coming directly at the subject, rather than from as angle. It will create shadows, cause reflections, and other issues. You should always go for either ambient natural light or soft artificial light from the sides as opposed to a direct harsh flash.
Make it Look Fresh
The main goal of your food and beverage photography is to get guests in your door. That means your pictures need to show your food in the best possible light. You need to make your products look fresh. One of the best ways to do that is to undercook the food you are photographing. For example, if you are photographing a steak, you want to cook the steak at a very high heat to get great caramelization and char marks, but cook it for a very short time, so that it keeps its general shape and structure. You want it to be black and blue, not well done. Likewise, if you are photographing vegetables, you only want to blanch them.
When it comes to cocktails, the main concern is your garnishes. For fruit, you should cut a fresh lime wedge, an orange wheel or any other fruit right before you take the picture. For your herb garnishes, keep them misted with water, or even in water (depending on how much the herb will absorb) before staging your shot.
For garnishes on items like soup, you want them not only to look fresh but also to float perfectly on the top of the soup. One easy way to do this is to put a ramekin upside down in the middle of the soup bowl and fill the bowl until the ramakin is barely covered. Then, you just put the garnish on top of the ramekin, where it will sit nicely centered and above the soup.
Tricks that Make Food Look Amazing and Inedible
If you have ever eaten at a fast food restaurant you know that the picture of the burger on the window and the burger you get rarely looks anything close to the same. This is because a lot of food photos used by national chains are not entirely pictures of edible food. For example, it is common to use cardboard circles inserted between the layers of ingredients in a burger to make sure it has volume. This also works great for things like stacks of pancakes.
Ever wonder why the cheese on photos of burgers always looks perfect? It’s because it isn’t melted on the burger while it is being cooked. Just like with a steak, a burger looks best when it is undercooked. The cheese can then be placed on the burger afterward when it is being assembled for pictures, and a heat gun or hair dryer can be used to melt the corners of the cheese on the burger giving it that perfect melted look.
Some food photography tricks that are used in professional pictures go even further in staging a photo that shows off the food. For instance, most pictures you see of pancakes don’t have real syrup on them. Syrup gets absorbed into the pancakes too quickly to get a good photo. Most of them use motor oil instead. It is the same color but more viscous, so you get better drips and less absorption. If you see a picture of fries that are glistening, usually either clean vegetable oil was brushed on them, or they were sprayed with WD40, either way, you get the same effect.
Other common tricks are using mashed potatoes for ice cream since it doesn’t melt, using glue for milk since it won’t absorb into cereal, and even using tampons dipped in boiling water or cigarettes hidden behind an item to create steam. Do not feel obligated to do these things. You have to decide where you want to draw the line between showing your guests your food or drinks and an artistic expression of what they could be.
I have done all of these tricks at one point or another. But, I try to stay away from using things that motor oil or cardboard when I take food and drink pictures, there’s dishonesty to it. I always, however, undercook most things I am photographing and melt cheese with a hair dryer. You need to determine where you want to draw the line, and there is no wrong or right answer. But you need to be honest with your guests and yourself about your products.
Beverage Photography Tricks
When photographing beverages, just like with food, you need to make sure that you are showing your cocktails, wine, and beer in the best possible way. For cocktails, the main thing is to make sure that you keep your garnishes fresh. If you really want to make them pop, mist some cold water on them right before you take the photo.
If you are photographing beer, one of the hardest things can be capturing the beer with a great head. The easiest way to make sure you get a picture-worthy head on a beer is to add some salt to it. This will cause it to release CO2 and keep the head looking great longer. Salt is also a great way to make sure pictures of champagne or sparkling wine show all those wonderful bubbles inside the glass.
If you want your glasses to have a frosted look, where there is condensation forming on the glass, and you are not in Texas in the summer, your best bet is to mist water onto them. Another way to make a drink that looks cold and refreshing is to make sure you use fresh ice, adding it right before you take the picture. You do not want to ice to dilute the color of your cocktail. You could also use fake ice since it will not melt or change the color of your drink.
Final Thoughts
One of the best ways to promote your bar online is to use high-quality pictures of your food and beverages that show your potential guests just how awesome you are. Mouth-watering pictures that make them feel like they need to come in and try what you have to offer. Just make sure that the actual drinks and food you serve are just as “Instagram worthy” as the photos. That way your guests will take their own pictures, post them, and market for you.
If you are looking for more ways to supercharge your marketing, make sure to schedule a free thirty-minute strategy session with The Bar Business Coach to learn how we can collaborate.
