Food Photographer
Menus, dishes, drinks and dining rooms, photographed since 2006 for restaurants and food brands across Orange County, Los Angeles and San Diego.
Food that pops.
Photography that sells every dish.
Twenty years of lighting and styling food for restaurants, brands and cookbooks across Southern California. Every image is built to look as good as the food tastes.
I'm a professional food photographer, and I've been photographing food since 2006: menus, dishes, drinks and the rooms they're served in, for restaurants and food brands across Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside. My food photography services cover menus, delivery apps, websites, advertising and packaging.
Looking for a food photographer near you? I am a professional food photographer based in Orange County and working across Los Angeles, San Diego and the Inland Empire. Instead of renting a food photography studio, I bring the studio to your kitchen: lights, backgrounds and props for menus, ads, packaging and social media. See my work as a Los Angeles food photographer, Orange County food photographer and San Diego food photographer.
Food photography
Light. Style. Shoot.
Food photography styles.
Find the look that fits your brand.
Every kind of food photography.
All under one roof.
Styled on set. I style the food myself, so sauces, garnishes and textures look fresh and intentional in every frame.
Light shaped for every dish. Soft light for salads, crisp light for crunch, backlight for steam and drinks. Each plate gets the light that shows it best.
Unlimited images. Flat rates start at $495 with unlimited images from the shoot, delivered in three business days.
Taste it with your eyes.
People eat with their eyes first. Beautiful food photography gives them a reason to order, visit and share, long before the first bite.
How I shoot food
I'm Alan De Herrera. I've been a food photographer for twenty years, working out of Orange County and shooting across Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside. This page is the practical version of what that involves — what I shoot, how a day runs, and what you end up with.
The short version: I light everything, I shoot on location in your kitchen or dining room, I work around service, and you get every usable image from the day.
Over those twenty years that's meant national campaigns for Coca-Cola, Disney, Universal, Tyson Foods, Bush’s Beans, Chipotle and Subway — and a great many single-location kitchens who get exactly the same lighting and the same attention.
Menu shots are portraits
A menu shot has one job: make someone choose that dish. That means the plate is the subject, the background stays out of the way, and the light does the selling — steam, gloss, crumb, the wet edge of a sauce.
This is food menu photography: the images that go on your menu, your website, your ordering app and your digital boards, so they have to survive being shrunk to a two-inch tile and still read instantly. A beautiful wide scene doesn't do that. A tight, well-lit dish does.
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Most restaurants want twenty to thirty menu images. I shoot each dish on the surface that suits it, usually two or three angles — a three-quarter hero, a flat overhead for grids and apps, and a close detail for social. That way one dish covers several placements instead of needing a reshoot when you change platform.
If the images are going to a delivery app, I also deliver a version clipped to white at the crop the platform asks for, with a real shadow left under the food so it doesn't look like a floating cut-out.
Why food looks wrong
A camera doesn't see what you see
Your eye corrects for colour, adjusts for brightness, and ignores the ugly reflection in the glass. A camera does none of that. It records the fluorescent tube in the ceiling, the green bounce off the wall, and the fact that the sauce went matte forty seconds ago.
That gap is the entire job. Almost everything I do on a shoot is closing it — controlling where the light comes from, what it bounces off, what it reflects in, and how fast we work before the food stops looking like food.
Food styling
When a dish needs a stylist, and when it doesn't
Food styling gets talked about as though it's either essential or a scam. It's neither. It's a tool, and some dishes need it badly while others don't need it at all.
The ones that need it: ice cream, gelato, anything frozen. Melting cheese. Foam and crema. A hero burger that has to hold its shape for three hours. Anything where the photogenic version and the edible version are genuinely different objects.
The ones that don't: most plated restaurant food, shot fresh, with your own kitchen plating it and me directing. Your chefs already know how the dish should look. They just need someone telling them which side faces the camera and how high to build it.
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When a stylist is on set, the work is mostly invisible: proteins cooked a little under so they don't shrink and grey, grill marks placed deliberately, a light brush of oil so a surface catches the highlight, tweezers for the garnish that has to sit exactly there, a spray bottle for the condensation on a cold glass.
Styling is quoted separately and only when the shot list calls for it. I'll go through your dishes with you before we book and tell you honestly which ones need it. I'd rather you spent that money on an extra half day of shooting if the food doesn't need the help.
Editing
After the shoot
Every image you get has been graded, not just exported. That means colour corrected so the red of your sauce is the red of your sauce, contrast placed where it flatters the texture, and anything distracting cleaned out of the frame.
Where you need a product clipped to white — delivery apps, catalogues, print — I cut it properly and keep a real shadow under the food, because a dish floating on pure white looks like a stock photo and people scroll past it.
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Retouching is deliberately restrained. I'll remove a stray crumb, a fingerprint on a glass, a chip in a plate. I won't rebuild a dish that wasn't there, and I won't smooth food into plastic. If a burger looks like it was rendered rather than cooked, nobody orders it.
Photos are delivered within three business days of the shoot, in web-ready and full-resolution versions, named so you can find things later.
The shoot day
What actually happens
We agree a shot list before the date — which dishes, in what order, for what use. That one document is the difference between a productive day and an expensive one.
On the day I arrive early and build one lighting set-up that will carry the whole list, so the twentieth dish looks like the first. Then it's a rhythm: plate comes out, we shoot it, plate goes back, next. A full day is usually thirty to forty-five dishes plus room and detail shots. A half day is fifteen to twenty.
You sit at a tethered monitor beside me and see every frame full size as it's made. If the garnish is wrong or the angle isn't flattering the dish, we fix it while the food is still in front of us. Nobody finds a problem two weeks later in a gallery.
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Group the shot list by where the images will be used rather than by menu section — ordering app, website, social, print. It changes the crops and it changes the order we shoot in.
Think about surfaces too. Two or three backgrounds that match your room will carry an entire menu and keep the set looking like your restaurant rather than a studio. If you have a mood board or a competitor's page you like, send it. It's much faster to aim at a reference than to describe a feeling.
We work around service. Closing is almost never necessary.
