3 Tips To Up Your Restaurant’s Instagram Game

Having good quality and beautiful images is essential to making potential customers hungry and ready to come through your front door. Here are a couple of hacks to ensure you’re able to capture your food and achieve incredible results.

• Use natural lighting – Light is key to taking beautiful still life photos. Always try to shoot your food pictures in natural daylight rather than artificial lighting. The best time of the day is when the daylight is soft and diffused as a bright sun can cast harsh shadows. If you’re taking pictures indoors, try to have a table set up by a window so that you can capture the natural light easily.
• Use a Neutral Background – When taking a food photo your background is very important. If the background is too messy or colorful they attention won’t be directed at your food. Try to remain consistent with the background you use for your food pictures so that your branding and message is easily remembered. Ink and Elm Backdrops are one of our favorite methods to accomplish this! They offer a wide variety of 2’x2′ Food Safe Backdrops. This is important so that you can keep consistent throughout your photos, their food safe backdrop is printed on strong, durable vinyl constructed of a flexible fabric hidden between a thin layer of vinyl which creates flexibility and tear resistance. The fabric is also water resistant so it makes cleaning these up a breeze!
• Color and Presentation – This is true for both pictures and food in general. Foods that are bright and have good presentation are going to make your brand stand out and your customers will want to come in and try your food. So make sure your food isn’t messy and arrange it in a way that creates balance and creativity. But keep in mind that you do want your online images to showcase what they will receive in the restaurant so don’t add any additional garnishes to make the image look better if you don’t plan on making that change in the house as well.
• Angles – Often times shooting from above is your best choice for food. It allows you to see the details and emphasized the dish and any other details within the scene. However, there is a time to shoot from an angle or in front. For example, if it’s a drink or a cake or something that layers should be captured consider shooting from in front or at an angle. If you aren’t sure which angle to go with try shooting from several different angles to get a feel for which looks best!
• Give Space – when composing your images consider leaving some space around the plate so that it doesn’t fill the entire frame. Why? Sometimes empty negative space will create a more pleasing composition and place more emphasis on your food. If needed, you’ll then have the flexibility to crop and change without affecting the food.
• Focus and Filter – Make sure that your camera is focused when you snap the picture and that everything looks good after. Don’t worry, we have an app we love for this! Foodie will make you look like a professional food photographer. All you have to do is tap your subject with your finger and your camera/app will focus on you. Once you’ve taken the picture you can edit the filter within the app where all filters were made with food in mind!

This is one of Instagram’s newer features that has quickly become a new version of Snapchat. Your stories can be clicked through for 24-hours and then they disappear and there are some cool benefits to you using these.

• You can capture behind the scenes, moments from a fun event and other moments at your restaurant without worrying that the quality is perfect.
• Has some fun built-in features like boomerang, hands-free, playing a video backward or even has the ability to go LIVE.
• You can tag other accounts in your stories like a drink brand, a band playing or an influencer to gain attention.

We hope these tips will help your restaurant succeed on Instagram. Happy ‘gramming!