Harvey’s Speisekarte
Food photography for Harvey’s in Frankfurt: pictures for the restaurant’s menu. Harveys FFM. Food photography for the menu at Harvey's in Frankfurt — and…
Food photography for the menu at Harvey's in Frankfurt — and what is shown here is the finished result: the menu itself, page by page. Pancakes and French toast, Brussels vanilla waffles, power sandwiches, homemade bowls, “Ei, Ei, Eierlei”, the early bird specials and the drinks page.
Pictures for a menu have to work with each other, not on their own: the same crop, the same light, the same distance to the plate. Otherwise the spread looks assembled, however good the single photograph is. A bowl from above next to a waffle from the side is exactly the break you see instantly on an open menu and would never have noticed one frame at a time on a screen.
The second difference from a picture made for a feed is space. On these pages the photograph runs off the edge, gets cut by the column and has type set beside it. So it is shot wider than the final crop, and every frame keeps a quiet area — otherwise the design has nowhere to put the prices.
The colors are agreed in advance. The menu is cream and teal; red and yellow come exclusively from the food — raspberries, pomegranate, banana, egg yolk. Crockery and surfaces are chosen so they do not argue with that palette, because a blue plate on a teal page puts two blues side by side that fight.
And a menu gets printed. Paper takes saturation away, and what looks juicy on a monitor is a shade flatter in offset. So for print the exposure runs slightly richer and the contrast slightly harder than a screen would require — and that is also why the result is shown here as printed pages rather than as a collection of individual photographs. What counts is how it looks lying on the table.
- Restaurant
- Harveys FFM
