7 Reasons you SHOULD hire a freelance food and drink photographer
Hello there. I’m Cameron, a Manchester, UK based freelance food and drink photographer. Bar consultant. Hospitality social media manager and menu and beverage recipe developer. It's a long list I know, that's why I compress it down into the name “Smartblend” here to capture, craft and create.
However, what I want to talk about in this specific post is Photography. More importantly freelance food and drink photography and the 7 reasons why you should hire a freelance food and drink photographer.
But first, lets just cover some key basics…
Introduction to freelance food and drink photography
Food and drink photographers don’t just understand food and drink. They understand lighting, composition and styling, amongst other key skills that create great images.
I’ve worked in the hospitality industry for many years now. Not as a photographer but within Manchester cocktail bars, pubs, restaurants, cafes and hotels. From barbacking in busy cocktail bars to holding a position of general manager for an Irish bar. Training and development, bar management, I’ve done it all.
Throughout my time in the industry, I’ve lost count of the amount of times i have had owners tell me they “don’t need to hire a freelance food and drink photographer” because they have a friend who will do it for free. Or perhaps one of the bartenders can take a passable photo, and they will take care of all the food and drink photography for an hourly wage of £8.21.
These are the people that then often wonder why their bars, restaurants, cafes or hotels don't have as much of a buzz or reputation as their competition. Or why other establishments have massive online followings not understanding the difference a professional photographer can make.
On the other hand, there’s establishments who decide to hire a professional food and drink photographer. And not just the cheapest, but one who actually takes the job seriously and has a passion for it. These establishments, owners and managers tend not to look back to the dark days of blurry phone photos.
Why the need for a freelance food and drink photographer?
Professional photographers have a passion for their craft and the skills to go along with it. It's an artistry, capturing a specific movement or story in a photograph. Understanding how a camera works and how to capture beautiful images of a subject, with correct lighting, composition, aperture and focus often leads to photographers having the abilities to shoot in a variety of ways.
However, photographers tend to lean towards a niche or/and a specific style. Whether that style is dark and moody photography or bright and light photography. Just because they shoot one way doesn’t always mean they don’t have the ability to shoot the other.
There are many reasons why a photographer may prefer to photograph a specific niche. Take me for example, the reason I photograph food and drink is because I have a passion for it. Having worked for years within Manchester bars, restaurants, cafes and hotels means I understand what these places want and how to work with them, to get the best out of the job they pay me to do. I understand flavours of the drinks made and concepts of the dishes cooked. So I can use that knowledge to get the best out of my subject. Whether that subject be a latte from a cafe or a bottle of gin from a distillery.
7 Reasons to hire a freelance food and drink photographer
So, with all that being said. If you’re still umming and ahhing about whether or not you need the services of a professional freelance food and drink photographer. Allow me to expand and give you a bit of insight on why i believe you should. Below is my list of 7 reasons you should hire a freelance food and drink photographer.
1) Freelance food and drink photographers understand how the industry works
For this, I'm going to ignore brands and food or beverage products and focus more on food and drink establishments. Cocktail bars, restaurants, pubs, cafes, music venues, nightclubs and hotels. They are busy places and can get quite manic at times.
Getting the best images of your food and drinks takes a certain level of care, which is hard to achieve in busy places. A good example of this would be a restaurant that serves Sunday roasts. To set yourself apart from all the other restaurants and cafes serving Sunday roasts you’ll want some high quality photos. Doing this on a Sunday with a full restaurant is just unrealistic. A professional photographer will understand its best to shoot these photos on a Tuesday or Wednesday, whilst the restaurant is quieter and the chefs have more time to make the dish look its absolute best.
When you rush the process you end up having cocktail photos with fingerprints and smudges on the glass, or badly lit food. It's important to consider the best times to schedule shoots. Along with the best place to shoot, where you will be able to achieve the best lighting. Without getting in the way of potential customers that are dining or drinking around you.
These finer details may be obvious to people who work within the industry. But for people out of the hospitality industry, these things slip their mind.
2) Stand out from the competition
The hospitality industry is saturated at this point. Wherever you're from there are new food and drink places opening, what seems like every 2 minutes. Take Manchester for example, sometimes I feel like a tourist in my own city when I’ve not been to a specific part of the city centre for awhile.
There is only so much you can do to stand out against the mass influx of competition in this industry. Having a good location with good footfall will always bring in customers. Having beautifully designed decor and interior. Along with tasty and aesthetically pleasing food and drinks will create free marketing for you, through customers taking photos and sharing them on their own social media.
However, if you really want to stand out from the competition you need to have good photos. The food and drink industry isn't just about taste but it relies massively on looks. No matter how tasty your pan fried sea bass with honey roasted vegetables is, no one will think that if they have to eat it from a toilet bowl. Okay, that example is a bit far fetched but you get the point. I’ve been there before, where I've had amazing tasting drinks but the colour has put people off.
That being said, to attract more customers. You need a website and social media. You can't just talk about your food and drinks and hope it attracts new customers. You need more then words. You need mouth watering photos to go along with them words. People want to see what your food and drink looks like to whet their appetite.
3. Building brand identity
Brand identity is important. Having a fine dining restaurant, with high quality food and drink ingredients means you tend to charge a bit extra then the average dive bar. How do you convince people who have never been to your restaurant that they will get that fine dining experience for what they pay? Sticking “Fish and Chips” on a menu with a £15 price next to it won't do their job. How do you portray the concept before people have visited you?
The answer is photos. Photos don't just whet the appetite, they build the brand. Your establishment has a story to tell and the right photos will tell that story for you.
Brand identity is a biggie in marketing. Having built your brand strong enough that people can recognise a dish from your restaurant without seeing where its from is the aim. Having different styles of photos all over your social media isn’t going to allow you to build your brand. That inconsistency is going to hurt your brand. If your brand is luxury based, all your photos, advertisements and promotions that you post on your social media or on your website need to portray luxury.
The same goes for if your brand identity leans towards a casual or relaxed atmosphere, accessibility, tropical. Whatever your theme or concept may be. You need to be building it into your brand's identity with the use of professional photos.
Take my brand for example. Smartblend, I'm building the brand around a colour scheme of blue and gold. If you work with me you will see the colour scheme all over my website, my social media, even my invoices. So in the future when you see something with the same blue and gold you don't just think “That’s blue and gold” you think “That's the Smartblend blue and gold” It hopefully keeps me in the minds of clients or potential clients. And having an array of services, from Food and drink photography to training and development can get crowded. There are a lot of services to remember, so building a brand identity will be massively helpful. People are much more likely to remember me as a hospitality brand rather than a list of hospitality services. Get it? Brand identity = important. Photos from a professional photographer = brand identity.
Building that brand identity will be all the better for your ROI (Return on investment)
4) Food and drink styling
Making your food and drinks taste great is half the battle. A big part of creating cocktails and dishes is the look and feel. Capturing that look in a photo is harder than it seems, and requires a certain level of skill. That's were a professional freelance food and drink photographer comes into play. Portraying some kind of emotion is a big part of what we do. Do you want your Mai Tai or Pina Colada to make people feel like they're on a tropical island somewhere and not in a basement bar in the middle of rainy Manchester? A photo will help drive those emotions.
A photographer who specialises in food and drink will be able to deliver the concept of your bar, restaurant, cafe or hotel in a photo.
There are subtle details in taking food and drink photos that you or whoever is willing to take your photos for free may miss. But a professional will not. Things like smudges on glasses, or the way a certain dish looks in a photo. You may not consider these factors until you’ve already posted your photos on social media. Then there's this constant niggle that it would look so much better if you just cleaned the bloody glass.
Behind the scenes of a wine photoshoot
End photo
Styling isn’t just about making sure the glass or plate in the photo is clean either. It's also about the best angle to complement the subject. Whilst one dish may look its best from a bird's eye view, another may look best from its side. A freelance photographer will take all this into consideration whilst on a shoot, to ensure that the photos compliment that subject the best they can. Whether that's a drink, food or interior.
There's a lot of tips and tricks at the disposal of photographers to achieve this. You may have heard before about food products using glue to make milk look gooey, or fake ice cubes in drinks. These are the types of lengths photographers and food stylist go through to make food and drinks look their best. Its not necessarily deceiving people. On the contrary. It's just capturing the food or drink in motion, or at its best within a photo. That call for some sneaky tricks. And tricks are what photographers have in buckets.
5) Professional equipment
Taking these high quality photos is more than skill. Skill gets you a very long way but you need professional equipment to utilise that skill. If you’ve ever bought a camera before you will know that it isn't a cheap industry. Cameras can quickly rack up a big bill, and its not just the cameras. You need an array of lenses to be able to shoot different styles of photos. Having high quality photos from a distance requires a totally different lens than having a close up shot. To be able to shoot close up with high quality detail calls for another completely different lens.
Then there are tripods. Which you need, to keep the camera placed perfectly whilst you style the subject around the angle. Then you have lights. Taking photos in bars and restaurants often means low quality lighting. Especially here in Manchester and the rest of the United kingdom where people seem to love a good basement bar. Not to mention, working around bars and restaurants opening times and peak hours leads to inconsistency in lighting.
One place may only be able to shoot in the morning whilst another may only have the time later on in the day. This means artificial lighting is almost always a must.
After you take the photos, editing and retouching is often needed to perfect them. This means photo editing software is needed.
All this professional equipment gets really expensive really quick. When you hire a professional photographer you’re not just paying for them to take photos, you’re paying for their skills and you’re paying to rent the equipment they have. What may cost thousands of pounds for you to own, you get to use for a tiny fraction of the price.
6) Product images are essential
People want to know what to expect from your food and drink product or your establishment. Before they visit your establishment or buy your product they want to know what they're getting.
People are more likely to buy or visit you, if you have photos showing who you are. This is important not just for your food and drink but also interior photography. Having that collection of attractive photos from your bar or restaurant will increase the likelihood of people visiting after looking you up online.
Especially for hotels. You want to see what a room is like before paying for a hotel. Having photos that show their best quality will increase the likelihood of people choosing you over a competitor.
Photos will also help with SEO (Search engine optimization) so having them on your website will not only make it look more attractive, show your brand identity and whet the appetite of potential customers. It will also help with your ranking on search engines like google.
After all, how will you convey your concept or what you sell to people who don’t speak your language? tourism is a massive part of bars, restaurants and hotels. Not to mention products. The answer? Photos
7) Attracting new clients
Photography is critical to getting people into your establishment or to buy your product. Whether it's a cocktail bar, pub, cafe, restaurant, hotel or a food and beverage product. Especially given how crucial social media is in this day and age. To drive your social media forward and stand out, you’re going to need professional photos.
Taking photos on your phone, or without the correct expertise just won’t cut it. I get that it's difficult to see a return on investment with photography. And that may put people off. Not so much in the brand and product world. But for the bars, restaurants and hotels side of the industry it does.
Decisions in these establishments are normally made on immediate return on investment. But in a world where great bars and restaurants close down on what seems like a weekly basis. You need to focus more on attracting new customers as well as building relationships and engagement with past customers to keep them coming back. Photos are an easy way to do that and a professional freelance food and drink photographer is something you should be considering.
Working with Smartblend
Need a food and drink photographer? Why not contact me today. I work with a variety of hospitality type projects. To name a few:
Cocktail bars, restaurants, cafes, hotels
Food and drink products
Distilleries
Hospitality events and competitions
Interiors and decor
Food and drink blogs
Cookbooks, recipe books and advertisement campaigns
If you have a need for a photographer and it's not included in the above. Why not contact me anyway to see what we can do!
I’m based in Manchester, UK. which means, if you’re from Manchester, i can pop down to speak to you face to face about what i can do for you as a photographer. If you’re from outside Manchester but still within the United Kingdom, don’t fret, I’m available to travel!
And lastly. If you’re in need of product photography. Then it doesn't matter where you’re from because I work both on-location and in the studio. We can discuss projects over email and see what we can do for your concept.
Get in contact today by clicking here. Or you will find my email address and social media at the bottom of this page.
For a few scrumptious food and drink photos. You can check out my galleries below