Food · 2024
Bitter Sweet
A restaurant cookbook shot the way the kitchen actually looks at service — low, warm and mostly shadow, with one raking light doing all of it.
- Client
- Fen & Foss
- Year
- 2024
- What we did
- PhotographyFood stylingRetouch
The brief
The publisher wanted bright, airy and overhead. The chef wanted the book to look like his room. We shot a test of both and put them side by side rather than argue about it.
What we did
Scorched steel surfaces, a single raking source at plate height, and no fill at all. Ninety per cent of every frame is shadow, which is the correct proportion for that kitchen.
The result
A hundred and forty finished plates across eleven shoot days. The publisher used the dark test as the cover.
