Covering: Food and Cocktail Photography
Most of this shoot was built around clean, on-white plate photography. Each dish was shot against a pure white background, lit evenly to bring out texture and color without harsh shadows or unwanted reflections on the plates. This is the format most restaurants actually need day to day, since it drops straight into a menu, a website page, or a delivery app listing without a background competing for attention.
Pergola’s menu includes some intricate plating, seared beef tenderloin with charred vegetables, a seafood starter finished with coral and micro herbs, and canapés on dark slate boards, so a lot of the work here was in getting the angle and lighting right for each individual dish rather than applying one setup across the board. A wide, shallow plate photographs very differently to a tall, layered dessert, and getting consistent results across a full menu means adjusting for that dish by dish. The result is a set of images that all sit together as one clean, cohesive library, ready for the kitchen and marketing team to use however they need.
Alongside the on-white set, this shoot included a series of styled shots built around mood, color, and setting. A cocktail photographed against the pool’s turquoise tile, plates set on dark stone with a glass of wine just in frame, a dessert flat lay with fresh flowers and soft natural light. These are the images a hotel uses for Instagram, a homepage hero, or a seasonal campaign, where the goal isn’t to show the dish in isolation but to sell a feeling.
This kind of work leans more on art direction than on-white photography does. Choosing the right surface, the right props, the right light source, and figuring out how much of the dish to show versus how much atmosphere to build around it. For Pergola, that meant working with the textures already on property, the pool, the stone tableware, natural light through the dining area, rather than bringing in a studio setup, so the images still feel true to the restaurant rather than staged somewhere generic.
Good food photography earns its cost back fairly quickly. A menu with clean, accurate images converts better than one without, since people order what they can see clearly. Social content shot properly gets reused for months instead of once. And having a full library shot in one session, on-white and styled together, means a restaurant isn’t stuck patching together phone photos or one-off shots whenever they need something new.
This approach works the same way for any fine dining restaurant, regardless of where it’s located, which is part of why this kind of shoot has become a regular part of the hotel and restaurant photography done across Cambodia, from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap.
This shoot sits alongside other hotel and hospitality photography work around Cambodia, including recent projects in Siem Reap. If you’re a hotel or restaurant looking for food photography, on-white, styled, or both, get in touch to talk through what you need.