Food and drink
Plates off your own menu, cocktails, coffee, puddings. What actually leaves your pass — just lit better than the kitchen ceiling manages.
Food and drink examples
Ovenlight Studio · Manchester
I photograph food the way it tastes
Photography for restaurants, cafés and food producers. I come to you, light it in your own kitchen, and the finished pictures are with you inside a fortnight.
What I shoot
Three reasons people ring
Usually a menu that photographs worse than it tastes. Sometimes a product that has to sell itself online. And sometimes a place nobody knows from the outside.
Products and packshots
Preserves, oils, chocolate, beer. Cut out on white for the shop, and in a set for advertising and social media.
Product examples
Places and the people in them
The room, the bar, the kitchen mid-service. Pictures that show what a customer is walking into and who is cooking for them.
Venue examplesHow a shoot works
From the phone call to finished pictures
A plate looks its best for about twenty seconds. The whole shoot is set up so that the shutter goes within those twenty seconds.
- 01
We talk it through
You tell me what needs shooting and what it is for — the website, a delivery app, or print. That sets the time and the price, and it sets the licence.
- 02
We book a date
Most shoots run in the morning before service. It does not hold the kitchen up and there is nobody sitting in the dining room.
- 03
The shoot
I bring the lights, the tripod and the props. You plate up as normal, and each dish is shot the moment it comes off the pass.
- 04
Selects and retouching
Contact sheets within three days for you to pick from. Finished files inside a fortnight, sized for the web and for print.
No client quotes here
Three things to settle before a shoot
Ask me, and ask anybody else you are getting a price from.
Ask what the licence covers. A price for taking the pictures and a price for using them everywhere, for ever, are different things. Get the licence written down: where they can appear, for how long, and whether that includes paid advertising.
Ask who is plating up. A photographer arranging your food and your own chef plating it give different pictures. If it is going to be your chef, they need to be told before the morning of the shoot, not on it.
Ask what happens to the dishes that fail. Some plates do not photograph, whatever you do. Find out whether you are charged for those, and whether a reshoot on the same visit is in the price or extra.
About the studio
One person, one camera, two lights
Ovenlight Studio is one photographer in Manchester. I have been shooting food for eight years, starting with a friend’s café that needed pictures for a delivery app and had nowhere to get them.
I would rather shoot on site, in your own kitchen. Nothing travels, nothing goes cold on the way, and the pictures show where the food is actually cooked. I cover Manchester and the North West, and I travel anywhere in the country.
Got a menu that photographs badly?
Tell me what you cook. By the next day you will have what I would shoot, how long it would take and what it would cost.
Write to the studio