Question 1

Does FoodShot send a photographer to my client's home?

Accepted Answer

No. FoodShot never sends a photographer, never runs an on-site or studio shoot, never prints menus and never cooks or fabricates a dish for you. It restyles photos you take yourself. You cook the real course, plate it the way you always plate it, take a phone photo of it on the client's own worktop, upload that photo, and FoodShot re-lights and re-stages that exact image — the same plate, the same sauce, the same garnish, the same portion. Nothing is invented, which matters enormously in this trade: the household comparing your portfolio to what lands in front of them at eight o'clock has to see the same dish. What changes is the lighting, the surface underneath and the clutter behind, not the food. If a course is not on your menu, it will not appear in your photos.

Question 2

When am I supposed to take the photo during a service?

Accepted Answer

One quick overhead per course, taken in the ninety seconds after you plate and before it goes out. That is the whole shoot. Hold the phone directly over the plate, take three frames, and carry on — it costs you less time than wiping the rim. Shooting at the pass moment matters because that is the only instant the dish is correct: the sauce still holds its edge, the herbs are not wilting from the plate heat, the crust has not gone soft under a sauce, and nothing has slid. A course photographed four minutes later is a different dish. If you are cooking a six-course tasting menu, six overheads over three hours gives you a full sequence for the proposal deck and a month of posts, and no guest will notice you doing it.

Question 3

The lighting in my clients' kitchens is terrible. Can that be fixed?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is the single most common thing private chefs bring to us. A domestic ceiling downlight sits directly over the plate and flattens everything, warm bulbs push the whole frame orange so a rosy duck breast reads brown, and a dining room at nine at night gives you a dark, noisy image with a hard shadow of your own head across the plate. FoodShot replaces the lighting rather than correcting it: your dish is re-lit as though it were on a studio table with controlled directional light, so the sear, the gloss on a jus, the flake structure in a fillet and the ridges on a quenelle all come back. The limit is information — if the frame is so dark or so blown out that the garnish is not visible at all, no tool recovers what the sensor never recorded. Shoot near a window when you can, and you will never hit that limit.

Question 4

How do I build a portfolio without identifying my clients?

Accepted Answer

By keeping the frame on the plate, which is what these styles do anyway. Every FoodShot scene replaces the background behind and beneath your dish, so the client's dining room, their art, their island, their children's drawings on the fridge and anything else that would identify a household simply is not in the finished image. That is a real commercial advantage rather than just a courtesy: discretion is part of what a private client is paying for, and a portfolio full of anonymous, beautifully lit plates signals that you understand the job. Shoot the plate, not the room. If you want environmental context, use a neutral styled surface rather than the actual table, and describe the setting in your caption instead of showing it.

Question 5

Can I use these images in a client proposal or sample menu?

Accepted Answer

That is what most chefs use them for. A private chef menu proposal is normally a document full of course titles and no pictures, sent to a household that has never tasted your food and is choosing between you and two other chefs on price. Attaching a styled image to each course changes the conversation completely — the client is now comparing menus they can see rather than a list of ingredients. The most useful set is one image per course in the same style, plus one wider spread showing the full sequence, plus a tasting flight of small portions for the cover. Those images then do second duty on your website, your directory listing and your grid, so a single dinner you were cooking anyway pays for itself three times over.

Question 6

How is this different from photos for a restaurant or a caterer?

Accepted Answer

A restaurant shoots the same dishes in the same room under lighting it controls and a pass it designed, so it can hire a photographer once and use those images for two years. You cook a different menu in a different house every week, on a worktop you have never seen, under whatever bulbs the owner installed. That is why a saved house style matters far more to you than to a fixed venue — it is the only thing that makes forty different kitchens look like one chef. The scale is different too: a catering operation photographs volume and set-up, and a fine dining room photographs a signature dish it will serve four hundred times, while your portfolio is built one bespoke dinner at a time and every image has to carry more weight.

Clients book the menu they can see.

Every course you send out, shot like a studio plate

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Private Chef Photography FAQ

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