Kaunas Restaurant Photography

So while doing our other project with TwoSidesBlog.Com actually got us kind of noticed, we were asked to do some photoshoots and videos for Meniu.lt. It’s one of the bigger websites in Lithuania that allows you to rate, reserve, and find more information about restaurants and other food places around your city.

Every week we went to different places to either film a short 30 seconds video trying to introduce the place or just menu and surrounding photos. Let’s talk more about the videos. The thing is, 30 seconds is quite a short period of time, remove the end and start credits, as short as they are, and you’re left with 27 actually usable seconds. At that time you have to show the location of the restaurant, the food preparation part, quite a few shots of the overall interior, and some of the food selection or guess dining.

What’s the best approach here? I don’t know, but for me, I took a simple one. First, a few shots from the outside, then we cut to the interior, a few wide-angle shots to establish the overall geometry and how the place looks. In the best-case scenario, you jump to the kitchen where you show a few close-ups or action shots of the food being prepared, and you intersperse that with a few detailed or interesting shots from the interior or exterior.

The end is the food being served and in the best case eaten by someone. But that’s not always going to be the case, some restaurants give you 3-4 already prepared plates of food and lets you do anything with it. Other waits while someone orders things to get a few seconds of camera time and then bring to the customer. The same is with the kitchen, in one place they let us film the whole process with fire and interesting shots, and in other places you don’t even see how the kitchen looks. So different strokes for different folks, some of these things just fall on to a simple thing miscommunication. I have to admit, I do that some times and some people from Meniu.lt does that 😀

Here is the playlist of most videos we made for Meniu.lt or for ourselves. Enjoy.

Now let’s turn our attention to photos, here it’s kind of the same situation. In some places, the photo shoot took about an hour, and in others more like 3 or 4. And even if you have to wait, 10-15 minutes in between the meals to the photoshoot, that time adds up. So what I’m saying is that it is frustrating something, especially if your hungry and all you can do is just do photos of that delicious fooooood.

To start, let’s go to Portofino and find some luxurious fish, meat, and tasty desserts. The theme we went to was a dark and lush color pallet. While not having lots of control over the backgrounds and all of the selection of props, but with the help of the restaurant staff found some things here and there and started working. Here are the results of that photo shoot:

After this photoshoot, we went to Medžiotojų Užeiga, which is located in the heart of Kaunas Rotušė. As the name suggests it’s a place where meat and hunting are the main themes and having fur on the wall is absolutely necessary. It’s also a bit more expensive place, a place for a fancy dinner rather than just a quick lunch.

We tried a few different approaches, using fur and other old props from around the restaurant to create an interesting background, using the fireplace to create warmer colored backgrounds and just plain “On the table” photos. For my personally, I think that having a single theme and a center point would have helped here a bit, but stress does that for you, always room for improvement.

The restaurant Soul is located just on the other side of the street of Medžiotojų Užeiga. It’s a warm and cozy place with gorgeous looking food. The interior is located in a basement type building, so half of it it’s very dark and cozy even at day, and the other half of the restaurant is very brightly lit by huge windows. It’s something for everybody, but even here we had a small window of time until the next guessed arrive, so while the food looks great, it was still a bit disappointing to take so few photos.

We also had a chance to do some photoshoot with Mūū BBQ. It’s an interesting idea, a fast-food kind of place and in the evening it turns into a nice dinner restaurant with cozy lighting and live music. So basically you have two restaurants for the price of one. But sadly our experience was not that great here, the photoshoot took around 5 hours, most of that time was just waiting for the food, which was not that fun. And considering I never got paid for these photos, yeah, not so great. But hey, what can you do but shame this kind of people.

In the words of some Dj guy, “Another one”. This time it’s Europe Royal Kaunas, a hotel and a restaurant is located near Akropolis, so it’s in the main part of the city. It’s a beautiful restaurant and a very cozy looking hotel. Fun fact, since this hotel is build kind of inside of old buildings, there’s a statue called Light Bringer on the roof. It’s a nice unique detail for this place, and the food looked really tasty. Well, maybe not just looked, because we just ate it after the photoshoot…