Case Study: The Tiffin Tin

Brief.

Founded in 2005 in Hornsey North London, The Tiffin Tin are an popular Indian takeaway restaurant with six kitchens across the North and East of the city, as well as offering catering for events.

They are known for their authentic flavours, they bring home-cooked flavours from their home of Sri Lanka and India to their menu. They offer a wide selection of classics and traditional dishes - cooked on charcoals with Naan breads freshly made in the Tandoor to elevate their flavours.

The team reached out to me and gave me a simple brief; they wanted to refresh their food photography content library for use across Instagram, TripAdvisor, Google My Business and on their website.

As a long-time customer of The Tiffin Tin this sounded like a fun project.

Approach.

We started off with a quick call call where I was able to learn about their brand and messaging. I put together a 1/2 day photography package that covered kitchen reportage imagery of the chefs producing popular dishes, handheld imagery of team members holding dishes for a human touch, and a collection of food photography heroes - showing pairings of dishes together.

I hand-picked a selection of vinyl backgrounds from my collection and advised the client on a small assortment of props to be sourced for the session, in addition to providing a schedule for us to split our session into.

During the session, we started with the reportage photography, following Chef Puskar producing a few different dishes, from start to plating - catching lots of interesting details and action moments.

For the food photography heroes, I created scenes using my vinyl photography backgrounds, and the props that I’d advised the client bring in. Using these, we were able to make a wide selection of food photography scenes, and closeups of specifics dishes.

We finished on their handheld food heroes as a great way of adding a human element to the food photography.

All content was lit with a studio flash, positioned to give contrast and shape to the food - showing texture and the gloss of their authentic menu.

The client was very pleased with their edited imagery and booked me for a follow up food photography session, also leaving a 5-star review on Google, “I recently had the opportunity to work with Hikaru Funnel for a photoshoot of our dishes, and it was a fantastic experience! Hikaru is professional, brilliant, and incredibly friendly to work with. He provided valuable advice on capturing our brand perfectly, and the photos turned out exactly as we envisioned.”