Restaurant Photography Guide

People choose restaurants with their eyes before they taste the food. The best hospitality photography tells your story and creates a feeling in the viewers mind.

Before jumping in and photographing individual dishes, capture the venue itself.

You’ll want to include:

• Exterior shots
• The entryway
• Dining areas
• The bar
• Kitchen
• Any outdoor seating areas

You want your potential guests to imagine themselves being at your venue, enjoying that drink and delicious meal!

An empty restaurant doesn’t communicate energy or vibrancy.

Lifestyle imagery featuring genuine human interaction will perform better than perfectly staged empty interiors.

Don’t only photograph spaces and the ‘big picture’, try honing in on the details.

Look to capture:

• Cocktails
• Table settings
• Hands serving food
• Coffee pouring
• Textures
• Flowers
• Architectural features

These images will add that extra something to your website and social media posts.

When we’re supplied image assets for a website build we often see images supplied mostly in one orientation (usually portrait).

Websites needs a good mix of landscape and portrait images.

Landscape images are particularly useful for:

• Website hero banners
• Full-width page sections
• Homepage feature areas
• Blog and editorial images
• Google Business Profile, YouTube, and LinkedIn banners

Think about capturing wider compositions that give the image room to breathe. Don’t place your subject right up against the edge of the frame. Extra space can be invaluable when an image needs to be cropped or needs text placed on it, like a website banner or printed material.

Vertical photography has become increasingly important, particularly for social media, but it also has uses on a website.

Consider vertical images for:

• Instagram posts, Stories, Reels, and other social content
• Mobile website layouts

Vertical images can also create more visual variety when they’re used alongside landscape photography in a website gallery or grid.

It can be tempting to photograph everything in one orientation and simply crop it later. The problem is that you can lose important parts of the image in the process.

Instead, when something is particularly important, shoot it both ways.

For example, a beautifully plated dish might be photographed as:

Landscape → website banner

Portrait → Instagram, mobile layout or social campaign

Remember you’re creating a library of images that need to work across multiple channels.

AI is becoming another tool in the design and marketing kit, and used thoughtfully, it can at times be useful.

Photoshop and other photo editing tools can now use AI to extend an image, remove distractions, tidy up backgrounds or make minor adjustments to a composition. These can be useful ways to make an existing photograph work across different applications.

But there’s a line worth keeping in mind when it comes to food photography.

Don’t use AI to invent the food.

Your guests should be able to trust that what they see in your photography is what they can expect to receive when they visit your venue.

A completely AI-generated dish can create an unrealistic impression of the food, portion size, ingredients or presentation.

Use AI to enhance a great photograph, not to replace the real thing. Authentic photography builds trust, and in hospitality, that matters.

Before the shoot, think about where the images are likely to be used. If you know you need a wide hero image for the website and portrait imagery for an upcoming social campaign, tell your photographer.

The key takeaway is that great hospitality photography isn’t just about taking beautiful pictures, it’s about creating the right pictures for the job.