A plate has a few seconds to make someone hungry. A good food picture does not sell the dish, it sells the moment before it - the steam, the light on the glaze, the hand lifting the cloche. For restaurants, bars, hotels and producers, from the menu to the campaign.
A single picture often decides whether someone walks into a place or keeps scrolling. As a food photographer in Berlin I shoot dishes, drinks and the people in the kitchen so that you see the plate in front of you, not a catalogue still life. I prefer to work where the food is made: in the restaurant, at the bar, in the hotel. The steam above the plate, the light at the pass, the chef’s hand - all of that can be rebuilt in a studio, but on site it usually looks more believable.
How a dish is plated is up to the kitchen. How it reads in the photograph is something we agree on beforehand: top-down or a low angle, warm evening light or clean daylight, a full table or one plate against a quiet background. Most of the time we go through the menu together first and decide which dishes show the character of the house best. Starters, mains, desserts and drinks together make a set of pictures that belong to each other.
A food picture has to work in several places today: wide on the website, vertical in a story, square in the feed and small in the delivery apps. That is why I shoot with a little air around the edges, so every frame can be cropped later without losing anything. You get the edited images at full resolution and in web-ready sizes as well. For channels that run all year a recurring date pays off: the new menu, seasonal specials and a few frames of the team. That way the picture library still looks like one house instead of ten different photographers.
Drinks follow their own rules. Glass lives on edges and backlight, ice melts faster than you think, and foam rarely lasts more than a minute. So for cocktail photography the light is set before the first drink is built. Flamed fruit, sparks, smoke or a fresh sprig of herbs are not decoration for its own sake - they show what actually happens behind the bar. For bars and hotel bars this produces pictures that hold their own next to the food and carry the same handwriting.
A venue is more than its plates. The dining room, the bar, the terrace and the exterior belong in the set too, so the website does not look assembled from five different shoots. When food and rooms are photographed on the same day they match in light and colour, which is why architecture and interior photography often runs in the same appointment. On request I also photograph the team at work, for the about page and for job ads.
We put the appointment where it disturbs service least - often in the morning before lunch, or on a closing day. How long a shoot takes depends mostly on how many dishes are on the list and how quickly the kitchen can send the next one. You get the finished pictures within five working days. My studio is at Karl-Lade-Strasse 36 in Berlin-Lichtenberg; single dishes, packaging and products can also be photographed there. I have been photographing since 2003 and work in German, English and Bulgarian.
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Request a shoot+49 157 528 899 87 · info@mlesemann.com