A typical shoot day starts before service, usually mid-morning, when natural light is soft and the kitchen has a moment to plate without the pressure of a full dining room. The first 20 to 30 minutes are spent simply reading the space — where the light falls, which corners work for ambiance shots, where the best table is for context photos.
Once the setup is ready, dishes come out one at a time, plated exactly as they would be for a guest. Each one gets a few minutes under the lens — a couple of angles, a couple of small styling adjustments, checking the shot on screen before moving to the next dish.
Ambiance shots usually happen in the gaps — while a dish is being replated, or just after the last one, capturing the dining room, small details like glassware or lighting fixtures, and sometimes the team at work if they're comfortable being photographed.
A full session for a focused list of dishes plus a set of ambiance shots typically takes two to three hours — long enough to be thorough, short enough to fit around a restaurant's schedule without disrupting prep for service.
The real work often happens afterward, during editing: color correction so dishes look true to life, light retouching, and selecting the final set from what can be several hundred raw images down to the best few dozen. That's usually where a photo goes from good to genuinely usable across menu, delivery and social media.