Bay Area Food Photography – Ramen 101

I got a really cool opportunity to take pictures of Ramen 101’s delicious food. Austin and I went to Ramen 101 in Dublin, but there’s one opening in Pleasanton! We met Daniel, the restaurant manager, who told us about his and his boss’s mission for the restaurants. It was so cool hearing about the restaurant business and how they care deeply about customer experience. I’m super excited for them to open Ramen 101 in Pleasanton!

This shoot was so fun and interesting! They’re using these photos for social and maybe the newspaper. I still have to resize them and add messaging to the photos, but I’m happy with how they turned out. It was a learning experience and I’m thankful that Daniel trusted me with the photos.

Prep: I brought two white poster boards as reflectors and then I also got a black poster board too after Daniel suggested I bring a black backdrop. That ended up looking super cool in the photos!! So I’m so glad we brought that. I looked at a lot of photos on Pinterest that appealed to me and also read blog articles about how many objects look good in a food photo, how much negative space to have, etc. It was fun to get creative!

Shooting: Austin was super helpful as usual in helping style the food! He’s really good at it (hi Austin). We were originally going to take pictures inside but the lighting wasn’t as great, and it stopped raining outside so we moved tables outside. The sun peeked in and out of the clouds, so it made the lighting a little bit inconsistent, but I did my best to keep the black board consistent! Everything was pretty blue because of the sky, so I think maybe in that kind of situation I might adjust my white balance points of something? Also I left space open for the words/ads/logo of the restaurant. For not having many reflectors, using natural light, and doing this for the first time, I’m quite proud of the end result. We later went to a sushi restaurant and stayed inside to take pictures, but we used the two white poster boards and it looks kinda cool!

Editing: Editing wasn’t actually that bad! I just tried to keep the colors real. If I’m going to bring poster board and put food on it, I should bring several so that when the food gets on the poster board, I don’t have to edit out all the grease stains and things, haha! I also quickly taught myself a couple Photoshop things again (even though I took one class in high school and one in college… shows you have to keep practicing to keep up skills!!!).

Go check out Ramen 101 in Pleasanton when it opens in mid-December!

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