When you’re a small business owner, you look for value in just about everything you spend a dime on. And so when it comes to images for marketing, it’s understandable why some may think that an old picture from instagram that someone took 5 years ago is going to “do the job” in your print ad that reaches tens of thousands(or more!) of potential customers. But the simple truth is that it doesn’t work, and if anything makes the ad look like you don’t care about how your restaurant is portrayed. I know that that’s not true, you just don’t know where to start, or whether or not you can even afford to bring a professional in to the the job the right way.

I get it, I really do! You’re running a restaurant, or two, or five. You’re marketing team probably consists of you and maybe a GM that has access to your social media accounts. But let’s be honest shall we…you’re not really doing anything with your online presence, and you run those same old print ads because you just don’t have time to do anything about it. Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t take much to spruce up those tired ol’ print ads and to refresh your online image – and it’s a lot easier than you probably think.

Projects like yours tend to take 3 steps.

Step One: We’ll meet at your restaurant to discuss what your goal is. I want to learn what you plan on using the images for, and how much variety you want. This will help me determine a game plan for the shoot and coordinate with your kitchen staff. Coordinating with the kitchen staff is imperative because we don’t want any food sitting around waiting to be shot. Knowing how you plan on using the images will help determine where the food will be photographed and whether or not you’ll need room for copy (text) or not.

Step Two – The Shoot: You’ll be surprised how much we can get done with the proper amount of planning. Shoots like this take place between your lunch and dinner service as to not disrupt your day to day operations. I arrive towards the end of lunch service to start setting up, and when everyone is ready I’ll ask for the first dish to be fired. Because I’ll already know ahead of time a few different areas to photograph at, we’ll be able to move from one dish to another relatively quickly while still providing a variety of environmental backgrounds. We’ll wrap up around the start of happy hour and be out of the way as fast as possible. It’ll almost be like we were never there.

Step Three – Image Processing and Delivery: After the shoot, I bring load the images onto my editing workstation to be processed. The images are culled and sorted, exposures and color balance fine tuned, and optimized for your project use (whether it be web or print etc). Images are then uploaded to our online cloud storage for you to download. You’ll also be able to share the folder of images with anyone on your team that needs access to them.

Does your website or social media need some fresh content? Give me a call at 614-636-1083 and let’s have a chat!