From the novel to the iconic, Los Angeles is home to culinary experiences that’ll have you salivating in a heartbeat. Whether it’s a French-dipped sandwich for breakfast, a breakfast burrito for lunch (strange for sure!), or a classic chili cheese dog for dinner, every corner of the city offers something to get your stomach rumbling. Without question, these are unbelievable adventures for your taste buds but also amazing sights to behold. When it comes to the latter, our list of the 12 best food photographers in Los Angeles will be a godsend, helping you photograph the amazing range of cuisine LA has to offer for commercial and editorial projects.
At Wonderful Machine, we define food photography as “a product or experience, showing it being grown, prepared, served, or consumed.” So, If you’re currently scratching your head trying to find the best food photographers in Los Angeles for any stage of the experience, our list below will provide plenty of food for thought.
While Teal Thomsen specializes in travel, lifestyle, architecture, and still life photography, her imagery from the world of food deserves recognition as well. If your commercial and editorial campaigns require the feel of spring or summer, revealing drinks and dishes basking in the glory of warm sunshine, we’d highly recommend Teal Thomsen for the job. She largely makes use of angles from above, giving equal attention to the food and table setting, opting for clean and uncluttered arrangements within the frame. It’s an approach that unabashedly shows her love for still life photography.
Her photos have been seen in the pages of Conde Nast Traveler, American Way, and Health Magazine to name a few, while she has worked for the likes of Four Seasons, Magnolia Network, Crate & Barrel, along with numerous other travel and lifestyle brands.
Victoria Wall Harris has been snapping photos across LA since 2012, whether in lifestyle, product, travel and hospitality, portraiture, or food and drink. Untethered from any particular genre or style of shooting, her food photography is a medley of different delights, whether it focuses on light and airy spreads in the dawn of spring, or big, juicy hot dogs during the height of baseball season. She also combines her love for lifestyle photography with her food photos, sharing the ways in which food brings friends and family together.
Victoria has collaborated with the likes of Weight Watchers, Food & Wine, LA Magazine, Territory Foods, and People’s Choice Beef Jerky within the food and drink space.
Among our list of food photographers in Los Angeles, Joe Schmelzer will have you looking at food like it’s fine art. His portfolio would be at home in an art gallery, and it’s no doubt a result of his training at the Rochester Institute of Technology and California Institute of the Arts, where he earned a BFA and MFA respectively.
His photos have that feel of natural sunlight pouring in through the windows, a quality he harnesses with angles high and low to present dishes as flawless masterpieces. Separately, there’s a rare attribute to his photos taken from straight on, where the food is hoisted up to our eye level. By doing so, these images treat the food with an overdue amount of respect, recognizing them as an equal, contrary to the typical high angles where the food is reduced to something that needs to be gobbled up.
Joe has a stellar reputation in the hotel, food, environmental, and celebrity portraiture specialties, with a client list that includes Time Magazine, Vogue, Food & Wine, Good Housekeeping, Architectural Digest, and many others.
Sedona Turbeville is a Los Angeles food photographer who’ll make you believe that you’ve gone beyond the pearly gates. Her use of lighting has a heavenly touch, making you feel like the food before you is a reward for a lifetime of good deeds.
She also has a knack for surreal depictions of food and drink through close-ups. She can make a light coat of sugar look like snow coming down on a stack of brownies, or the hexagonal walls of a honeycomb appear like intricately intertwined pieces of gold jewelry. It’s a vision of food and drink unique to her, which definitely helps her stand out among the crowd. However, her portfolio does exhibit food photography from more textbook perspectives of framing and lighting, so it’s safe to say that she has much to offer a wide variety of brands and publications.
Her clients include Edible East Bay, Domino, Refinery29, Gantri, VINEBOX, and many more.
Having 20+ years of experience in any field is a significant advantage, more so in the photography business. It’s fair to say that during this time, Los Angeles food photographer Jonathan Young has seen it all, working on photoshoots large and small, even alongside video production teams battling tight deadlines.
While he is a particular fan of the bird’s eye viewpoint in his food photography, his portfolio exhibits range through other angles and perspectives too, especially with his close-ups bringing the minutiae of a dish into sharp focus. He’s also a photographer who enjoys the preparation of foods, photographing ingredients before and during the cooking process. That in itself takes skill, presenting raw ingredients in their best light before the final dish is even in the picture.
His clients in the food and beverage industry include Greenlife Fitfoods, Beyond Meat, ProLon, Harvest Pack, and many others.
One look at Daniela Gerson’s food photography will have you singing Prince’s Purple Rain all day long. She’s a Los Angeles food photographer with one message: veggies are sexy, particularly those with a purple pigment. Having started out as a chef herself, Daniela was passionate about sourcing colorful produce for her recipes, and after making the switch to photography, nothing has changed.
Her food photography has different shades of purple centerstage, coming to fruition through raw and real ingredients. With such a hyper-focused ideology, it’s easy to believe that her work suits a very niche market, but Daniela has joined hands with the likes of Vermont Creamery, Daily Harvest, Empress Gin, and Organic Valley to name a few brands.
The recipe for love is usually found at home with our families, and it wasn’t any different for Andrea D’Agosto. Growing up in Wisconsin, she was constantly around her family’s restaurants, privy to all the sights, sounds, and smells that would come together and make a delectable dish. After those formative years sparked Andrea’s love for food photography, she has now turned it into a satiating career.
She has photographed it all in more ways than one, tinkering with different angles, perspectives, lighting combinations, and color palettes to suit the client’s specific requirements. However, her close-ups deserve a bit more attention, revealing the finer details etched into a piece of food, whether it’s the crackle and sizzle of a piece of bacon or the sesame seeds adorning the top of a burger like a monarch’s crown.
When photographers with a dominant specialty approach another that is entirely different, the results tend to be rare and unique. Asami Zenri is a fashion photographer in LA who also happens to get food in front of her camera. Her approach in this area is strikingly similar to her studio-based fashion shoots, relying on clean and minimal setups to let the subject pop through. By doing so, Asami presents the kitchen and dining environments as one filled with peace and calm, quite unlike the scenes most of us experience on a daily basis.
If your brand or publication is looking for food photography with an interest in the essentials of a good image, choosing to highlight a few key ingredients, Asami is definitely a fine choice.
John Cizmas was originally slated for a career in the culinary arts, but a two-year waiting list at his local community college pushed him to take some photography classes and fill the spare time. During this wait, he was offered an internship at a magazine with the chance to work on food assignments, and that’s where he had his Eureka moment.
Since then, he has nourished a career of over 15 years, cooking up a storm with creatives, chefs, makers, mixologists, and artists. His food photography focuses on the essential, stripping the fat off the dish to leave only those elements that are vital to the final image.
A foodie and traveler with an education in visual journalism and photography, Jayme Burrows goes beyond the dish on the table. Her food photography incorporates a trio of elements to portray the complete story: the food, the chef, and the restaurant. She pulls the curtain back and casts a spotlight on the people behind the meal and the place that brought it all together. Depending on the subject, you can discover the unique synergy between these elements, where the viewer gets a true sense of an establishment’s cuisine. It’s accomplished by her remaining faithful to the restaurant’s identity, born through her use of color, lighting, and framing of the food’s journey from kitchen to table.
Jayme’s photos have been featured by El Pollo Loco, Chilis, Twisted Tea, NatureBox, Panera Bread, and many other brands in the food and drink industry.
Life is full of surprises. One day you’re graduating from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School with a degree in journalism, and the next day you find yourself being a full-fledged food photographer in Los Angeles. But we don’t think Shelby Moore minds this turn of events one bit.
His work in the field is fun, to say the least, fusing an array of contrasting colors to make the food pop to life. The bright and vibrant displays reel you into different parts of the frame, taking you from one place on the dish to the next before you zoom back and appreciate the splashes of color all brought together.
His portfolio also exhibits strong conceptual elements within his beverage photos, where he draws a connection between the final product and the ingredients that made it possible. We must add that he hasn’t abandoned his journalistic roots entirely, using a photojournalistic approach to document the workings of restaurants and kitchens for separate assignments.
Los Angeles food photographer Rebecca Peloquin is someone to remember for both your commercial and editorial assignments. Rebecca has more than 15 years of experience in numerous corners of the LA photo industry, whether it involved editing photos for awards shows or developing imagery for brands operating at various scales. While she originally focused on portraitures and cosmetics, her love for food and drink photography eventually trumped it all.
You could say she has a three-pronged approach to her food photography, separating her work into three tones: light, dark, and bright. Her photos in the light category have that quintessential sun-soaked quality of Los Angeles, while her dark portfolio sticks to colors with more earthy shades and hues. Finally, the brighter side of her food photography exhibits Pop Art influences, with the occasional entry into theatrical territory.
She has cooked up work with the likes of Door Dash, Hungry Root, Top Ramen, Wild Alaskan Company, and Endorphin Chocolate.
The food landscape in the City of Angels is as diverse as the people inhabiting it: a destination brimming with culinary discoveries for both locals and tourists. It’s only a matter of time before your brand or publication needs to photograph a new recipe, restaurant, or chef in the making. If your next assignment calls for any one of these to be captured on camera, our list of food photographers in Los Angeles will get you up and running.
Further Reading
Find more food photographers in Los Angeles through our directory.
Learn more about food photography through our specialty article.
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