This was a fun shoot

Yesterday, I spent a few hours taking some photos for a restaurant chain. They are expanding their catering services and changing up some of their menu items and wanted me to get shots for their website and social media.

I've eaten their multiple times and I really enjoy their food. So when they asked me to take some photos for them, I was pretty excited because I knew I was gonna be able to eat a bunch of food during the shoot and they made sure to hook me up with plenty of food to take home as well.

The shoot did not take place at one of their restaurants, so they brought one of their food trucks with them that served as a mobile kitchen where they cooked all the meat. Their steak tacos are amazing and it was cool to get photos of one of their cooks preparing it. It was pretty cold outside that day and it all of the steam coming off the hot food was pretty cool. I also like the diagonal light in this shot above.

The venue we were at for the shoot was really nice. The venue mainly caters to wedding parties and it was the perfect place to show off the restaurant's catering menu and how they set up for events. They had about six people there to assist me during the shoot. They allowed me to set up the tables where I thought they would look best and rearrange things on the tables to get my shots.

It was a pretty cloudy day and the sun was moving around quite a bit, so we had to move things around during the entire shoot, so it was nice to have people that I could direct and they just moved everything into place for me. It made it a lot easier than trying to get it all done myself.

For this entire shoot, I used natural lighting because it gives the most natural look to everything. Using a flash will change how things look and their colors. You want things the colors to look the same throughout the entire shoot because if a company is using your images for their website, it will need to have a cohesive color palette and you want to make sure the food looks the same throughout the entire site.

I captured some shots of their catering team in action serving the food to someone. For these shots, I wanted to show off the food as well as the service they provide to their customers.

It was pretty cool trying to think of how the images will look on their website as I was shooting. I always get nervous before a shoot when I taking photos in a style I am not familiar with. But as I am shooting and interacting with everyone, I get a lot more comfortable with it all and it starts to get a lot easier to think of different angles. They key is to try and tell some sort of story with each of the shots you take.

A lot of the shots where I have to showcase large amounts of food was pretty challenging. Mainly because the windows had beams across them that cast shadows across everything. If the windows were a lot larger and didn't have beams in them, it would have been so much easier because I wouldn't have had to deal with shadows being on top of different parts of the shot.

To deal with the shadows, I set my camera up to shoot a series of three shots. One shot was perfect exposure, one shot was under exposed and one was over exposed. Then I combined the images in Lightroom and merged them into one image that gave the shot a larger dynamic range. This allowed me to pull more out of the darkest and whitest parts of the images.

They got a shot of me taking the pictures. It was a really cool job and a lot of fun to take pictures in a way that I haven't ever done. It will be cool to see what they do with all the images I took for them. I will be doing another shoot for them soon that will take place at one of their restaurants. That one will be pretty fun to do and it will pose another challenge for me as I try and figure out how to make the best of the light that the place has. It was good to get out and take some different types of photos yesterday.

I hope you enjoyed these shots. The food was really good and I think I am going to warm up some of the queso they gave me and have a snack.