Beers at Dawn-Thirty // Tallahassee Magazine

Beers at Dawn-Thirty // Tallahassee Magazine

Tallahassee Magazine assigned us to photograph the food and drink imagery for a feature in their March/April 2021 "Gastro & Gusto" section on breakfast beers across North Florida. The story, written by Thomas J. Monigan, covered craft breweries and bars from Tallahassee to Pensacola, and our assignment was to capture food and beverage photographs at Madison Social here in Tallahassee.

Food and beverage photography is its own discipline, and it's one we really enjoy. The goal is to make the reader want to reach into the page and grab what's in front of them. With this assignment, we were working with both plated dishes and poured drinks, which means you're managing different textures, colors, and levels of detail in the same frame. A breakfast plate like chicken and waffles with syrup has warm tones and a lot of visual weight, while a beer or cocktail next to it is translucent and reflective. Getting both to look their best in the same image takes some thought about how you light and compose the frame.

Madison Social gave us a great environment to work in. Restaurant photography in Tallahassee always involves working within the realities of the space; you're fitting your setup around tables, service flow, and whatever natural light the room provides. We used Profoto lighting to give us consistent control over the food styling while keeping things moving at a pace that let the kitchen plate dishes fresh. Food photography has a short window; once something is plated, you have a few minutes before it stops looking its best, so the workflow has to be efficient.

We worked with Canon lenses that let us get in close on the details of the food while still being able to pull back for wider compositions that showed the full table setting and the drinks alongside the plates. The variety of pairings in the story gave us a chance to create images with different visual personalities. A dark stout next to a breakfast plate tells a different story than a bright citrus beer next to eggs and hollandaise, and those differences give the magazine's art director options when laying out the spread.

As Tallahassee photographers, we've worked with a number of local restaurants and bars for editorial assignments, and food photography is one of the areas where photography in Tallahassee continues to grow. There's a real food and craft beverage scene here, and publications like Tallahassee Magazine do a great job of showcasing it.

This feature was photographed by The Workmans for Tallahassee Magazine and appeared in the March/April 2021 issue and was written by Thomas J. Monigan. The Workmans are a husband-and-wife photography team based in Tallahassee, Florida, and we work with publications across the state of Florida, in Washington D.C. and around the United States. You can explore more of our editorial photography in the archive, see more of our work across our website and connect with us on how we can best serve you!