Cookbook & Cocktail Book Photography
Sixty recipes, one consistent look. The part of a book shoot publishers actually worry about.
The author on set · Ten Speed Press
Cocktail over the fruit basket · Ten Speed Press
Rum punch three ways · Ten Speed Press
Tres leches on terracotta · Ten Speed Press
The author with a finished pour · Ten Speed Press
Sancocho and tostones · Ten Speed Press
Sixty recipes that look like one book
A book shoot isn’t sixty good photographs. It’s sixty photographs that look like they belong to the same book.
That’s the part publishers actually worry about. Light drifts across a multi-day shoot. Props creep. A dish shot on day one stops matching a dish shot on day four, and by the time it reaches the designer it can’t be fixed in post.
The fix is boring and it happens before the camera comes out: one lighting setup, one prop palette, one tested workflow, held across the whole shot list.
Caribbean Cocktails · Ten Speed Press
Caribbean Cocktails published with Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in June 2026 — over forty drinks and twenty food recipes by chef Nelson German and Andréa Lawson Gray. It’s a bestseller.
Nelson is a Top Chef alum and the chef behind Sobre Mesa and alaMar Kitchen & Bar in Oakland. We’d shot both rooms before the book existed. When the manuscript sold, he already knew how we worked.
That’s usually how book work arrives — not from a portfolio, from a room.
Files your designer can use
Shot to the publisher’s spec and delivered ready for layout: full resolution, colour-managed, with room cropped in for spreads and the gutter. Vertical and horizontal frames of the hero dishes, because the layout isn’t final when the shoot is.
Test kitchen days run long. We work around the person cooking, not the other way round.
Sixty recipes. One look.
A manuscript with a long shot list and one deadline?
Send the shot list. We’ll tell you how many days it takes.
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