It's no secret around here that I am a huge fan of Matt Armendariz and Adam Pearson. Both personally and professionally, these guys are some of my favorite people around. And when I saw this salad posted as part of Matt's new column on the Cooking Channel website, I immediately wanted to make it. And, to make it the new remake challenge.

photo courtesy of Matt Armendariz; Styling by Adam Pearson

See, this photo hits one of my own personal challenges in food photography: Making a landscape photo look great. Whenever I am required to shoot landscape (and it usually takes a requirement), I cringe a little inside. It's quite a bit harder to get depth into a photo when you have limited vertical space... and I find myself trying to figure out what in the world to do with all that horizontal space around it (unless I know that some copy will run there).

For this challenge, make a simple, non-lettuce based salad (I highly recommend following or at least adapting Matt's recipe, because tomatoes photograph beautifully) and shoot it in a landscape composition like the original photo. Note where the light is coming from here too... you are going to need some sort of bounce to offset that lovely backlighting.

It's really helpful when you use the new diptych format when you post your results! For this diptych the original photo goes on the top, and your take on the bottom.

This challenge will run through the end of August.