Food Photography: 2012

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

My favorite client

My favorite client is absolutely Arthur Schuman Cheese Importers. I have so much fun shooting with Melissa Shore and the best food stylist in the world Marie Haycox. Here are some images from our last 3 day shoot.

Split Image studios is my favorite rental in New Jersey. John Campos who runs it is a very busy photographer but always makes sure that my clients and I are well cared for.

Melissa on shoot days becomes art director, prop stylist and client all while answering a never ending stream of emergency emails yet always with a smile!

Ah, my beloved Nikon D700 with it's full frame chip (giant 8.42mu pixels), super sharp 40 year old 55 macro lens and dependable Pocket Wizard.

This job involved shooting recipes for kids. You can see the tables covered in kiddy-type props one of which was a kaleidoscope. So I stuck it on my lens and shot.

Marie Haycox in the kitchen.

Marie Haycox on the set.

You can also see my optical spot with a small bush to break up the light hitting the set.

Melissa and Deb picking props.

So that it. Three days of hard work and fun with one killer team. Melissa, Marie and Bill.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Sneaky Pete

This one is very cool. Sneaky Pete's Beverage contains Heart Healthy Oat Bran but you'd never know it. It's just a yummy drink. I did these shots for my friend John Moran who now lives and works in Florida. It's great when clients become friends. It just makes the work all that much the more fun...

Friday, June 22, 2012

Greek Yogurt Bars

Food Photography? Certainly!
One of the ways I keep busy is to shoot supporting images for my food clients. My newest client this year is Rickland Orchards. Along with food images, I will be shooting more sports stars for them along with possible upcoming lifestyle shots and fun shots like this one of the CEO carrying an impossible pallet of product. My speciality is lighting food in a yummy way but I would go out of business soon if not for the additional images for my beloved food clients like these.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

4 days in heaven

This is the studio I rented for my 4 day shoot with Arthur Schuman Inc. We were shooting recipes for their new Cello website. Most of the images were captured with one Optical Spot and one head with a large reflector off the ceiling.

A few images (mostly pasta dishes) were lit with a medium bank kept far away for better contrast.

These next three images are of Marie Haycox. She is one great food stylist and one third of the team that made these three days so heavenly.

Marie works for all of the NYC television studios as well. Don't think that those famous chefs and actors making their favorite dishes really are... It's usually Marie!

Ummmm, Mascarpone cheese in desserts!

This smiling girl is Melissa Shore. I would tell you what she does but it would take too long (she does so much). She's the art director, prop buyer & stylist, final decision maker and so much more.

Here are a couple of images from this shoot. You can see how the hard light from the optical spots bring a little snap to the food. Yum!

So there it is. 4 days of fun making art for commerce. Money with a camera. There is no better way.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Paid to learn

These days I try to get paid to learn new technology. 18 years ago I was being paid to learn digital photography. I was one of the first and therefore have more digital experience than most. This time my beloved cheese client asked for a video for their new Cello website. We had been shooting still images for many days when the request came up. I went to Unique Photo, my local photo superstore and rented a Nikon D7000. I prefer Nikon because I have a large number of Nikon lenses and the D7000 can use them all; the manual and the auto focus. The set up for this shot involved locking a large 4 sided grater into 2 C-stands. The lighting was strobe modeling lights (that's right Speedotron modeling lights only) and the rest was just a matter of using a 300mm lens (450mm on the D7000) using my assistant to fake grate some cheeses, and me pouring 3 different cheeses down the grater while shooting 1080p video.
We shot a lot of "footage" and the rest was post production using Adobe Premier®, Adobe Flash®and Adobe Dreamweaver® to combine still images and video into a final .swf flash file for the website.
It took me longer then a real video pro to get this job done, so I am billing my client for only one day instead of the 2 1/2 days it actually took. I didn't want to bill my client for the time as I learned these new programs... Here is the video:

Food Photography