Cheese & Macro Food Photography
Shooting Cheese: Behind the Cathedral City Campaign
Cheese is one of the hardest subjects in food photography — and one of my favourites.Mixing cheese and macro food photography into a creative campaign is a dream come true, so when Otherway https://www.otherway.com/ briefed us on imagery for Cathedral City’s national billboard campaign, the challenge wasn’t just “make cheese look good.” It was making it look irresistible at billboard scale, with the kind of graphic clarity and texture that stops people in their tracks from a moving car.
Why cheese is a specialist subject
Melting cheese behaves differently under every light, on every surface, at every second. Get the temperature or timing wrong and it either sits stiff and unappetising or collapses into something shapeless. The shot everyone wants — that perfect stretch, the pull of a slice lifting away, the glossy sheen of a melt just past its peak — is a narrow window, and it doesn’t repeat itself twice. Shooting it well means understanding the ingredient almost like a chef would: how it melts, how it sets, how long you’ve actually got before it’s gone.
For the Cathedral City campaign, that meant building rigs and working methods specifically for repeatable, controllable melts — heat sources, timing, and camera position all choreographed so we could hit that exact moment again and again until the shot was right, rather than relying on luck.
Graphic macro food photography
The other half of the brief was scale. Billboard and out-of-home imagery has to read instantly — big, bold shapes and colour doing the work in the two or three seconds someone glances at it. That’s a different discipline to close-up food photography for social or packaging, where you can reward a longer look with fine detail. Here, the macro texture (the crumb, the tear, the condensation) still had to be there, but composed simply enough to hold together at enormous scale on a grey British street.
That combination — genuine macro texture with graphic, billboard-ready composition — is the core of how I approach food photography generally, and cheese in particular. It’s part science (understanding how the product actually behaves under heat and light), part craft (lighting and styling that flatters texture rather than flattening it), and part patience (shooting enough takes to catch the one moment that works).
Cheese and dairy photography for agencies and brands
This is the kind of work I love taking on: cheese, dairy, and melt photography for brands and agencies who need imagery built to perform, not just look nice in isolation. Cathedral City’s campaign has been running successfully across the UK’s out-of-home network, and it’s exactly this kind of brief — technically demanding, ingredient-led, built for scale — that I specialise in.
If you’re an agency or brand working on cheese, dairy, or any food subject where texture and melt are doing the selling, get in touch to talk through your brief.
Scott Choucino is a commercial food and drink photographer based in London and Leicester, working with agencies and brands including Dolmio, Papa Johns, PepsiCo, Doritos, Ben’s Original, and GoPuff.