Last month I took a little break from the usual weddings and portraits I shoot and tried my hand at food photography. Two family restaurants nestled in the beautiful city of Carmel hired me to capture their dishes. Both restaurants are currently revamping their websites so with a new layout comes the need for some new images. The restaurants, La Bicyclette + Mundaka are owned and operated by the Georis family, a staple of the Carmel community.

The shoot overall took a total of two days to complete. The first day we spent our time in La Bicyclette. This restaurant, which gets its inspiration from the European café culture is a cozy bistro offering French-Italian food and the best chocolate mousse I have ever tasted. Before the shoot we spent a lot of time researching online to find images that best represented the feeling and look the owners were hoping to get. Obviously we wanted the food to look inviting and delicious but there are 1001 ways to make that happen. Because we were shooting during regular business hours I was tucked away in the back so as not to intrude on anyone’s meal. Being that I was in the back of the restaurant away from available window light, which is usually my go-to light source for shooting, I knew I had to use artificial light for the images. Shooting with strobes when working with food or other small objects can either make or break your photos. You don’t want your images to look too evenly lit or flat, and you especially don’t want to lose detail either in your shadows in your highlights. For this series of images I chose to shoot with a Profoto B1 on a boom and used a 3’ Profoto RFI octabox as my modifier that produces a stunning quality of light. Shooting with this setup not only allowed me to achieve the exact look I was going for but it allowed us to finish shooting early and enjoy some of the food while it was still warm!