Guides
How to photograph the things people make, trade by trade — and how to get more out of the tool.
Menus, boards and displays
Photos for boards, windows and street displays
A window display is read from four metres away by someone walking past. Almost nothing about a good listing photo applies.
August 6, 2026 · 3 minute read
Menus, boards and displays
Adding one dish to a menu shot two years ago
The photographer came once, in 2023, and left. Now there is a new dish, and it has to sit next to the old ones without looking like an intruder.
August 5, 2026 · 3 minute read
Restaurants on delivery apps
Making forty dishes look like one menu
The delivery platform shows your dishes in a grid. Photographed over two years by four different people, that grid looks like four restaurants.
August 4, 2026 · 3 minute read
Menus, boards and displays
When a menu photo has to go to print
A photo that looks fine on a phone can fall apart at A3 on matt stock. Print is a different set of requirements, and you find out at the printer.
August 4, 2026 · 4 minute read
Restaurants on delivery apps
Why your dish photos look orange
Everything on the plate has a warm tint, the white china is cream, and the salad looks tired. Nothing is wrong with the food.
August 3, 2026 · 4 minute read
Restaurants on delivery apps
Photographing dishes at the pass without stopping service
A plate has about ninety seconds before it stops looking like food. That is the whole constraint, and everything else follows from it.
August 2, 2026 · 4 minute read
Woodworkers and small furniture
Photographing large pieces in a small workshop
The table is finished, the customer collects on Thursday, and the only place it fits is between the bandsaw and the timber rack.
August 1, 2026 · 3 minute read
Woodworkers and small furniture
Photographing grain and figure so the timber sells itself
A buyer paying for quartersawn oak is paying for something visible. Flat overhead light makes it invisible.
July 31, 2026 · 4 minute read
Woodworkers and small furniture
Making hand-cut joinery visible in a photograph
The dovetails took four hours. In the listing photograph they are a faint line at the corner of a box.
July 31, 2026 · 4 minute read
Plant shops and nurseries
Photographing the plant you actually ship
The listing shows a mature specimen in a terracotta pot. The box contains a rooted cutting in plastic. Both were true photographs.
July 30, 2026 · 3 minute read
Plant shops and nurseries
Photographing variegation accurately
Variegation is the entire price premium. A photograph that exaggerates it is a dispute waiting to arrive by courier.
July 29, 2026 · 3 minute read
Plant shops and nurseries
When green disappears into green
A plant photographed in a greenhouse is a plant photographed against thirty other plants. The buyer cannot tell where one ends and the next begins.
July 28, 2026 · 4 minute read