You’ve got to love when two passions combine, and at Block Art We LOVE food and Photography so when we got the recent opportunity to take some promotional food photos over at Boho Cafe, Canterbury. We were pretty excited.
We were greeted by the waiting staff and the head chef, Chris, who had prepared a selection of the current favourite dishes on the Boho Cafe menu. We set up our gear on the table next to the front windows, for anyone into photography you can read more about the lighting set up below. Our aim with this shoot was to take images which matched the “personality” of each of the dishes whilst matching Boho’s brand. We used lots of woody rich textures and traditional looking fabrics as we felt this complemented the cafe’s bohemian and rustic feel.
One of our favourite images was of a lovely dish of mussels cooked in a Curious Apple cider sauce. Chris explained that he had just got some beautiful rich orange coloured muscles ordered in and explained they were some of the nicest he had seen and tasted. Their rich colour made for great photography material. The cider they were cooked in was from the folks over at Curious Brewery, who make a whole range of unique ciders and larger (You can read more about their new brewery in the recent Cene magazine article here). The cider had to make an appearance in the shot! We got a cold one out of the fridge and positioned it accordingly. Lovely! We also decided to add one of the 3/4 guitars, which Boho have hanging on the Cafe wall, as we thought it tied the scene together nicely as well as being a nod to the music evenings they host.
We were really happy with how the shoot went and the mix of props with great textures and colours created some really nice scene, which complimented each of the meals. And of course getting to try the food after is always a bonus!
A huge thanks to the waiting staff, manager Rob and the head chef Chris for a fantastic shoot at Boho Cafe.
The Lighting Set Up
We kept it simple but effective with the lighting; we used a mix of diffused window light and multiple bounce cards and reflectors to create beautiful soft even lighting for the dishes. We were lucky that Boho Cafe has a pair of bay windows at the front which made for the perfect spot to set up as it provided beautiful back and side light which work perfectly for food photography.
The Set up: We used diffused window light from the back and side and a variety of bounce cards and reflectors to fill in any harsh shadows. this created soft even light around the dishes