Sprouts…

I recently had the opportunity to work with the good folks at Sprouts Farmers Market shooting people on location and yummy baked goods in the studio. We had a ton of  bread, muffins and cookies at the studio… we could have fed a platoon of carb loving people…in the end all the goodies were donated to local food banks…of course less the stuff the crew inhaled!

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Who Wants A Stack of Turkey Burgers?

There’s nothing like a turkey burger. Then add turkey bacon and guacamole and you have magic…make them sliders and you have three times the fun.

We’ve done work for La Victoria Salsa along with Riester Advertising of Phoenix for a few years. We all enjoy the projects as well as the creative team work on the shoots. This latest project featured Jennie-O Turkey Bacon. The shot is being used in FSI pubs in major newspapers.

A big thank you goes out to the crew that made this balancing act a reality.

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Save The Date Oct. 20th

Just  a heads up…The Portraits Of Opportunity exhibit I participated in along with other area photographers is this Thursday night. Southwest Human Development started this fundraiser 3 years ago…a wonderful organization. Check out the Channel 8 interview with Laura Chasko and me.

http://www.azpbs.org/horizonte/detailvid.php?id=798

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After Dinner Coffee

Genus Imports is bringing high-end coffee service to the best of the best in restaurants and resorts. They have the North American license to sell Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee to these high-end purveyors of service and fine food. We were recently contacted by them to produce rich images for their website and marketing materials. They provide their clients with everything including table side service items and custom-made coffee flutes. My warm thanks goes to my assistant and my stylist who provided just the right props to help tell my clients story.

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Healthy Eating

We recently had the pleasure of working with Petra Kovacs from Isagenix International based in Chandler Az. She contacted me about producing a small cookbook using their nutritional products. This readers digest size booklet is going to be inserted into their client based publication.

Isagenics  message:
“Our vision is to impact world health and free people from physical and financial pain, and in the process create the largest health-and-wellness company in the world.”
Jim and Kathy Coover, Co-Founders

Thanks to my wonderful crew for making this shoot fun and successful!

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Healthy Cereal

Besides shooting ice cream cereal is probably next in line for complexity. In the world of packaging photography food products require a clean, simple and meticulous approach. A fast read and a quick to the point design is a must because the shopper has rows and rows of products competing for attention.

We recently shot a cereal-packaging project for “Peace” brand healthy cereals with graphic designer Randy Palmer.  I thought I’d share the process and the final outcome with you folks.

Here’s one of the shots:

Here are a few of the packages:

We had several shipping boxes full of product that was used to painstakingly go through and pick the best flakes and clusters:

Individual clusters were built into larger clusters using hot glue:

Each bowl was built on a foundation of Crisco that acted like a platform to keep the composition of flakes and clusters in place:

Once on set final adjustment to the contents were made to adjust for lighting and composition:

The final touch is adding white glue to the bowl in place of milk. Glue is heavier and whiter then milk and also doesn’t make the cereal soggy:

Finally, yours truly and designer Randy Palmer and the client and marketing folks:

Thanks goes out to Randy my trusty assistant Robert Humanski and the stylists Kim and Jill.

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Sundaes in Winter

In December we had the opportunity to shoot some new sundae creations for our client Coldstone Creamery. Ice cream can be a real bear to shoot…You need lots of patience and a great food stylist. Each sundae is an orchestration of carefully placed drips, dabs and drops. Keeping texture in the whipped cream and sexy highlights in the toppings requires a ton of lighting finesse. I thoroughly rejoice in the crazy fun of creating these ice cream sculptures. I must say the stand ins were very tasty. Enjoy!

A special thanks to Kim and Jill the ice cream gurus and Rob Penney for his fine art direction.

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Lunch is Served

The world of food photography is much like the world of sculpture. This is so true when it comes to building sandwiches for the camera. We recently did a series of shots for Bar-S Foods for their shaved and sliced turkey and ham luncheon meats. Each sandwich was carefully “constructed and engineered” by food-stylist Kim Krejca and her assistant Jill Flewellen. Each slice of meat was carefully chosen, folded and balanced on cosmetic sponges. Tomatoes, onions and cheese were sliced with a meat slicer to provide neat layering of the items on the bread. A stand-in sandwich was built for the purpose of lighting and composing the photograph. Once the composition and propping were approved the “hero” was placed on the set and further tweaks were done to both lighting and the composition of the sandwich. During the final process the sandwich was kept moist until the final image was complete. If we were in the restaurant business preparing food like this we’d be out of business in two hours!

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Summer Still Life

Now that labor day has come and gone and summer is almost a memory I’d like to share a small selection of summer vacation still life images with the kind viewers of this blog. As I began to edit the images I realized all of the images below have something to do with food…who would have thought that a guy that shoots still life, product and food would have picked mostly food oriented images…go figure!

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Cool Coffee Drinks

We recently shot some awesome tasty coffee drink photographs for Coldstone Creamery. We had to carefully match the color of the drinks based on what their test kitchen came up with, so we played with food coloring like a bunch of mad scientists and then I finalized color and contrast in the “digital barkroom” aka photo-shop.

Thanks to food-stylist Kim Krejca, photo-assitant extrodinare and stylist-assistant Jill Flewellen.

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