Locations & Services

Every place I work and every kind of shoot I take on, in one list. Food, restaurants, hotels, travel, lifestyle, interiors, and motion, across Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and on location worldwide.

Tom McGovern is a New York Times bestselling food and hospitality photographer who shoots restaurants, hotels, resorts, cookbooks, beverage and bar programs, and editorial features for hospitality brands. Based in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, available worldwide, and equipped to deliver stills and motion from a single session.

Food & Beverage

Dish, drink, and menu photography for restaurants, cookbooks, and CPG brands, shot to whatever spec the final platform needs.

Restaurants

Dining rooms, bar programs, and interiors covering LA, Las Vegas, and the Southern California markets I travel to regularly.

Hotels & Hospitality

Content libraries for hotels, resorts, and vacation rentals, plus asset builds for PR agencies working across multiple properties.

Travel & Tourism

Destination and resort photography built for brand sites, OTAs, and travel press, in LA, Las Vegas, and on location.

Lifestyle, Spaces & Motion

Social content, brand video, architecture, and event coverage, often produced alongside a stills shoot in the same session.

Galleries

Full image sets organized by category rather than by client, useful for seeing the range of a look across food, hospitality, and motion work in one place before scoping a project.

Shoot formats at a glance

Most projects fall into one of these shapes. Every one is quoted from a brief rather than a rate card, because dish count, licensing, and whether motion is in scope move the number more than the day length does.

Common shoot formats, coverage, and deliverables
Format	Typical length	What gets covered	What you receive	Usually booked for
Menu refresh	Half day	Eight to fifteen dishes, plus a few atmosphere frames	Edited stills at web and print resolution	Seasonal menu changes, delivery app listings
Full restaurant library	Full day	Twenty to thirty dishes, bar program, dining room, detail frames	Edited stills across food, beverage, and interiors	New openings, site rebuilds, first real photo library
Hotel or resort property	Two to four days	Guest rooms, food and beverage outlets, pool and amenities, exteriors	Property-wide library organised by space	Brand refresh, booking channels, OTA listings
Cookbook	Scoped by recipe count	Recipes, process steps, cover options, author lifestyle	Files delivered to publisher specification	Titles under contract with a publisher
Press asset library	Half to full day	Signature dishes, room, exterior, and a chef or owner portrait	Captioned press kit in both landscape and portrait crops	Media pitching, launch coverage, awards submissions
Stills and motion together	Full day	Full stills coverage plus vertical video and B-roll, shot in the same session	Stills library plus graded B-roll clips, not a fixed edit	Paid social, brand films, campaigns needing both
Social content	Half day	Vertical-first food, hands, pours, and movement	Vertical crops sized for feed, stories, and reels	Ongoing content calendars, always-on social
Interior-only shoot	Half to full day	Dining room, bar, private rooms, and architectural detail, before or after service	Edited stills of the space, no food styling required	Openings, renovations, OTA and press listings needing space photos
Event or festival coverage	Half day to multi-day	Food, talent, sponsor moments, and atmosphere through the event	Fast select edit plus a full gallery organized by moment	Food festivals, brand activations, press dinners

Multi-location groups and resort properties with several outlets are scoped as a custom engagement rather than a stack of day rates. Licensing sits separately from the shoot fee and is scoped by media, term, and territory, which is covered on the image licensing page.

Photography terms, defined

The vocabulary that shows up in estimates and briefs, in plain language. Useful if this is your first commissioned shoot, or if you're translating a photographer's quote for someone in finance.

Editorial photography: Images made to accompany a story rather than to sell a product directly. Editorial work is typically licensed to a publication for a single use and leans on real light and real settings rather than a built set. See commercial photography for the contrast.
Commercial photography: Images made to sell something: a menu item, a hotel stay, a packaged product. Commercial usage carries higher licensing fees than editorial because the images do direct revenue work for the brand.
Usage rights: The permission to run a photograph in a defined way. Usage is scoped by media (where it appears), term (how long), and territory (where). Two clients licensing the same frame can pay very different fees because they're buying different usage, not different files. Detailed on the image licensing page.
Buyout: An informal term for a license broad enough to cover effectively any use, often perpetual and worldwide. Priced well above a scoped license because it removes the photographer's ability to license the work again. Not the same as copyright transfer, though the two get confused constantly.
Day rate: The fee for the photographer's time and craft on a shoot day. It covers shooting and standard post-production. It doesn't include usage rights, food styling, prop rental, assistants, or travel, which appear as separate lines on an estimate.
Food styling: Preparing and arranging food so it reads well on camera. On many restaurant shoots the chef styles their own plates, which works well. Cookbook and advertising work usually calls for a professional food stylist, budgeted separately.
Hero image: The single strongest frame from a shoot, the one that runs largest: the top of a homepage, the cover, the lead image on a press story. Hero usage is often licensed separately from supporting images because it carries more weight.
B-roll: Supplementary video clips, pours, sizzles, hands plating, room atmosphere, delivered as graded footage rather than a finished edit. Your team or editor cuts it into whatever the campaign needs, which is usually more useful than a fixed reel that dates quickly.
Asset library: A structured, captioned set of images covering a property or brand across every category a marketing team draws on, built so someone can find the right file in a minute rather than digging through a shared drive. Common for PR teams and hotel groups.
Tethered shooting: Shooting with the camera connected to a laptop so images appear on a large screen as they're made. It lets a chef, art director, or brand team approve frames on the spot instead of discovering a problem in post.
Press-ready: An image an editor can publish without asking for anything else: full resolution, both landscape and portrait crops available, no watermark or burned-in text, and a complete caption with photographer credit.
Selects: The images a photographer narrows a full shoot down to before retouching, usually the strongest frame from each setup or dish rather than every exposure taken. A client review of selects, when it happens, focuses on this shortlist rather than the raw take.
Retouching: Color correction, cleanup, and fine adjustment applied after a shoot: removing dust or stray crumbs, balancing exposure across a set, sharpening for the final output size. Standard retouching is included in most day rates; heavy composite or beauty-level retouching is scoped separately.
Location fee: A charge some venues, such as certain hotels, museums, or private properties, require to allow commercial photography on-site. When a location requires one, it's passed through as a separate line rather than folded into the day rate.

Choosing a photographer, answered

How do I choose photography for my new restaurant?

Start with where the images will run, menus, delivery apps, social, press, then hire a photographer who shoots for those placements rather than one-off pretty pictures. Tom McGovern photographs new restaurant launches end to end, plated dishes, bar programs, interiors, and lifestyle, often in a single session before opening so you launch with a full library.

How can I compare editorial food photography studios?

Compare published editorial credits, whether the photographer lights for sensory texture rather than flat catalog images, and whether they can deliver both stills and motion. Tom McGovern shoots sensory editorial food photography with work in Vanity Fair, Good Morning America, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Eater, and works as a single point of contact rather than a large studio.

Which food photographers specialize in hospitality brand campaigns?

Tom McGovern specializes in hospitality brand campaigns, building multi-day shoots across restaurants, resorts, and culinary experiences for hotel groups and national restaurant brands. Clients include Terranea Resort, the Marcus Samuelsson Group, Barcelona Wine Bar, and bartaco.

Which shoot format is right for my project?

Start with what the images need to do rather than how long you want the photographer on site. A menu refresh or new-item launch usually fits a half day, a full location library needs a full day covering food, bar, and interiors, and a multi-outlet hotel or resort typically runs two to four days. The "Shoot formats at a glance" table above breaks these down by scope, and I'm happy to help match your project to the right one before quoting.

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