How to take good menu photos with your phone

Your online ordering page needs pictures, but hiring a photographer for every menu change is expensive. Taking them yourself often results in yellow, flat images that do not make the food look good. You do not need to buy lights or a new camera. You can take decent photos with the phone you already have, provided you change where and how you shoot.

Find a window

Artificial light in dining rooms ruins restaurant food photos. Overhead bulbs cast strange shadows and make white plates look orange or green. Turn off the flash on your phone. Flash flattens the texture of the food and creates a harsh glare on sauces and plates.

Take a small table and move it directly next to a window during the day. You want indirect natural light. This light wraps around the food and shows its true colors. If the sun is beaming directly onto the table and creating hard, dark shadows, you need to soften it. You can wait an hour for the sun to move, or tape a plain white paper napkin over the window glass to diffuse the light.

Turn the plate so the light hits it from the side or slightly from behind. This highlights the texture of the ingredients. If one side of the dish is too dark, hold a white menu or a piece of white cardboard on the opposite side to bounce some window light back onto the food.

Shoot one dish at a time

Do not try to photograph a whole feast. Menu photography is about clarity. A customer looking at your site wants to know exactly what they are getting when they order a specific item. Put one dish on the table. Keep the background clear of clutter, dirty napkins, or half-empty water glasses. A plain wood or neutral tabletop works best.

Before you take the picture, wipe the rim of the plate with a clean, damp cloth. A stray smudge of sauce or a fingerprint is obvious on a screen. When guests look at your menu pictures online ordering decisions are made in a matter of seconds. An untidy plate makes the food look careless.

Make sure the dish looks exactly as it does when it leaves your kitchen for a real guest. Do not add extra garnishes or double the portion size just for the photo. If the picture sets an expectation you do not meet in the dining room or the takeout bag, the customer will be disappointed.

Shoot from the guest's height

The overhead shot is popular on social media, but it rarely makes food look appetizing. Burgers look like plain buns from above. Sandwiches hide their fillings. Pasta loses its depth.

Hold your phone at the height a guest's eyes would be when they sit at the table looking down at their meal. This is usually about a 45-degree angle. This angle shows the layers of a sandwich, the height of a salad, and the steam rising off a hot dish. The only exception is flat food like pizza or soup in a deep bowl, which often does need to be shot from slightly higher up so the ingredients are visible.

Tap the screen on the main ingredient to set the focus. When you are doing food photography phone cameras can sometimes struggle to figure out what part of the dish matters most. Tapping tells the camera to keep that specific spot sharp. If the phone has a portrait mode, use it carefully. Sometimes it blurs the edges of the food incorrectly. If it looks unnatural, switch back to the standard photo mode.

Keep it consistent

Shoot all your dishes in the same spot, at the same time of day. Use the same table and the same background. When you upload these images to your website, they will sit next to each other in a grid. Consistent lighting and backgrounds make your menu look like a cohesive collection rather than a random assortment of pictures taken months apart.

Take a few steps back and use the zoom function on your phone slightly, rather than holding the phone two inches from the food. Getting too close with a phone lens distorts the shape of the plate and the food. Backing up and zooming in slightly keeps the proportions accurate.

Once you have your photos, you need a place to put them. lokal gives you a website with online ordering built in. You can upload your own photos directly to your menu items, and orders flow straight to your register.