Food Photographer
Menus, dishes, drinks, catering 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. I make sure every dish looks as good as it tastes.
I’ve been photographing food since 2006, and I still love it. I shoot menus, delivery apps, websites, ads and packaging. Rates are flat for a short shoot, with unlimited images.
I’m based in Orange County, and instead of renting a studio, I bring the lights and backgrounds right to your kitchen. See my work as a Los Angeles food photographer, Orange County food photographer and San Diego food photographer.
Every kind of food photography.
All under one roof.
Food photography styles.
Find the look that fits your brand.
Food photography services for restaurants and food brands
I shoot restaurant menus and dining rooms, delivery app photos for DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, packaged food and products, cookbooks, drinks and cocktails, and lifestyle shots for social media. I work across Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego and the Inland Empire. Every shoot includes creative direction, lighting and touch-up food styling, and your images are edited and delivered within three business days.
Explore the services: Restaurant photography · Delivery app & menu photos · Product & packaging · Beverage & cocktails · Pastry & desserts · Cookbooks · Lifestyle · Food styling · Dark & moody · Restaurant video & reels
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 that get exactly the same lighting and the same attention.
What is commercial food photography? It is food photography made for business use, from menus, websites and delivery apps to advertising, packaging and social media, shot to a brief and delivered ready to publish. If you are looking for a commercial food photographer in Orange County, Los Angeles or San Diego, this is the work I do. Some clients call it culinary photography or food advertising photography, and the job is the same: make the food look as good as it tastes, for wherever it will be seen. That includes food brand photography for packaged foods and bakeries, food and beverage photography for bars and drink brands, and chef photography for the people behind the food.
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.
Catering shots show the spread
Catering food photography is a different job from a menu shot. A lot of my catering shoots happen inside a restaurant shoot: part of the day goes to close-up, artistic shots of the plates for the menu, part goes to lifestyle images with hands and people interacting with the food, and then part of the day is for the catering menu itself.
Catering customers want to see what shows up at their event: the equipment, the setup and how much food they are getting for the price. So I shoot wider. Large metal trays and big bowls of salad, chicken, beef and rice are laid out on a table with the proteins and sides kept separate, and overhead flat lays work especially well. Sometimes I build a full table setup with several items, the way a catering client would see it on delivery. For Panini Kabob, a client for more than ten years, I also come out to their events to photograph guests at the catering setup and the team cooking on location.
If you are a restaurant or caterer in Orange County, Los Angeles or San Diego and need catering photos for your website, catering menu or event packages, get a quote and I will plan the shoot around your menu.
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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 color, 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 gray, 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 color 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, catalogs, 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 on 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 setup 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.
