There will come a time when you need to hire your food photography team.
When you start out as a food photographer, you may work on your own, executing commissions in your home studio, or travel to restaurants with your tripod and camera for a photo shoot.
As you gain more experience, you’ll win more complex jobs, which will require you hire people to help you.
In this post, I’ll give you some tips on who to hire, how to hire them, and share a bit about my experiences working with a team on food photography shoots.
Food Stylist
When you first start out as a food photographer, styling skills will help you execute simple jobs. You can make small tweaks to bakery desserts, or restaurant dishes, or style food products that don’t demand a high level of culinary skill.
Sooner rather than later, however, you’ll need to hire a food stylist.
Food stylists are trained to prepare and manipulate food for the camera. A top chef can be great at plating food for a customer, but it’s another thing entirely to plate food for the lens. Anyhow who has taken a picture of their meal with a smart phone knows what I’m talking about.
Not only will working with a food stylist on a shoot ensure that your product looks its camera-ready best, but it will also free up your time to focus on lighting and image capture.
Many clients don’t understand why food photographers don’t also do food styling on photo shoots. Not only is food styling a separate skill set that takes years to develop, photographers who do both styling and photography work a lot slower because they are doing the work of two people.
Food stylists charge a lot less than photographers do. It costs a client more to pay for your time as a photographer than it does to hire a food stylist together with you and execute the job in half the time.
It’s important to explain this as clients who often are not aware of the difference between the two types or roles, and that they require different skill sets.
To hire a food stylist, do a Google search for those working in your area and reach out to them. Once you have the details of the shoot, send them off to the stylist and ask for a quote. When you do up your estimate for the client, be sure to include these numbers as line items. When the client pays you, you can then pay the food stylist. If the client happens to know the food stylist and have a working relationship with them, they may pay the client directly.
I personally prefer to pay the food stylist right away, using the money I received from the deposit. Paying your contractors right after the shoot, creates a sense of goodwill and strengthens the relationship between you and your teammates.
PRO TIP: Before hiring a food stylist, try to do a test shoot where you work together on a couple of portfolio pieces. Split the cost of the food and trade some images for the stylist’s efforts. You’ll both get photos for your website that can fill some gaps, and you’ll also get a chance to see how well you and the food stylist work together. A good working relationship between the food stylist and photographer is critical to the success of any food photography shoot.
Camera and Lighting Assistant
Another valuable member to add to your team as soon as you are able is a camera assistant or lighting assistant, or someone who can help you with both.
I brought an assistant to my first professional food photography job— shooting at a high-end restaurant—and I’ve used one ever since. For me, an assistant is non-negotiable. I will pay their fee out of my own pocket if I have to. It’s that important to me.
When shooting in a restaurant or elsewhere on-location, a camera assistant can help you carry your gear, swap out backdrops and lenses, and move your lighting around. Not only will this save you a ton of time, it helps you work much more efficiently and allow you to concentrate on capturing the best quality images that you can.
Sometimes photographers can be great creative visionaries but lag behind in some of the more technical aspects. A great lighting technician can be a godsend on set, and make you look your best as a food photographer.
Second Assistant
On larger commercial shoots, you’ll typically have more than one assistant and each will do something different. You’ll have a camera assistant and another assistant focused on the lighting. On advertising shoots, you may have three assistants, depending on the complexity required to capture the images.
When you’re newer to the industry and working on smaller shoots, you can hire one assistant who can help you with the lighting, tethering, and moving your equipment around. Most assistants can do all of these things for you.
Digital Imaging Tech
A DIT—or digital imaging technician—is responsible for tethering your camera to your computer and making sure that your images are being backed up. They also can edit on the go; they are proficient in colour grading, clipping path and doing on the fly edits that you may need to envision the final results and make and necessary tweaks.
A DIT is not necessary (and not often in the budget) for small shoots but are usually hired on larger commercials shoots. For smaller projects, an assistant can help you, as mentioned above, or you can manage the tethering on your own.
Retoucher
Whether you’ll need to work with a retoucher will spend on the kind of jobs that you do. I do most of the retouching on my jobs. When I work with agencies, they often have someone in-house doing the retouching according to their creative brief. Sometimes you’ll supply them with edited files that are aligned with your style, and they’ll do clipping path (cutting subjects out form the background in Photoshop) or create composites with your files. Other agencies will take your RAW files to apply the vision they have for the campaign, and you don’t have to do any editing at all.
However, there are times on commercial shoots when a photographer will work with a retoucher on set. The reason in that some subjects need to be shot in a specific way and a retoucher can advise the photographer on how to best approach the subject and can start retouching the photos on set.
An example of this would be an image where all the layers of a sandwich or burger appear to be suspended in mid-air. Proper composition of all of the photo elements and how the shadows and highlights all are crucial in this kind of shot. Mistakes can be impossible to correct in posts, so it’s a god idea to have the retoucher involved in the shooting process.
How to Hire Your Team Members
As a food photographer, you are self-employed and typically won’t be hiring staff unless you’re running a big studio. Your team will be other contract workers and not require payroll or benefits.
You simply include their fees in the estimate for the client and pay them when the job is done. They are responsible for tier own taxes. However, be sure that you are following the employment laws in your own country. For. Example, your contractors may be required to have their own worker’s compensation insurance. You also must have your own equipment and liability insurance.
Building and Maintaining Relationships
Collaboration is crucial to success.
Finding the right people to work with harmoniously with you will help you produce better work and keep your clients happy. Not only should your collaborators work well with you, but they also need to interface professionally and courteously with clients.
As with personal relationships, finding a good fit and building trust and rapport can take time. Most photographers work with the same key team members for years, but it’s also a good idea to have several contractors on your roster than you can reach out of one of them is busy or otherwise unavailable.
Unless you always work alone in a studio, working on a team is part-and- parcel of being a food photographer, and for many of us, it’s the best part.
There is a feeling of camaraderie and accomplishment when you work together to create a successful result.
To Sum Up
There is no reason to not hire a team member or two when you’re starting off in professional food photography. Their fee always goes on the estimate as a line item—should never be coming out of your pocket.
Perhaps only the very small clients will understand this, and if they don’t, I always explain that it allows me to work much faster, which means we can get more done in a day, and that it saves them money in the long run.
