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.

If you are new to the monthly photo challenges, head over to the Flickr group for the rules and to introduce yourself.

This challenge will run through the end of August.

I knew I perhaps had a problem at the last blogger meetup I attended. As everyone was going around telling a little bit about themselves and their blogs, I began to worry. Which blog to I choose? Do I really list all of them? People might start falling asleep by the end. But, some people know me from Cook & Eat, others from Still Life With, others know me as that crazy doughnut lady or the photographer who is sharing a studio with Clare Barboza. And, would it surprise you if I said I had possible plans for even more?

The time had arrived to give my blogs a single, simpler home. Now you can find (almost) everything that I blog all in one spot. You can subscribe to the whole kit and kaboodle, or just the categories you are interested in:

• Cook & Eat
• Still Life With
• Doughnuts
• Photography Portfolio
• Love

I also added a snazzy new archive page. Literally. The plugin I’m using is called Snazzy Archives, and it’s kind of sweet looking.

I’m sure there will be kinks I’m working out of the next few days, but I hope you enjoy it!

I’m happy to announce the first of what I hope becomes many food styling and photography workshops in my new studio space, Spare Room! The classes are small, so if you are interested, you’ll want to get your tickets soon before they fill up!

You can purchase tickets on Brown Paper Tickets:

Natural Food Styling & Photography

This 1/2 day Natural Food Styling & Photography Workshop is for anyone interested in learning the basics of food styling and photography for editorial purposes. We will focus on simple plating and propping of food for the most appealing photos without resorting to tricks that render the food inedible. We will also cover creative lighting techniques using natural light. Students should have a working knowledge of their camera setting. This class is limited to 6 people.

Cost: $99 (plus ticket fees)
April 17, 12:30pm to 4:30pm

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/104299

Natural Food Styling & Photography

This 1/2 day Natural Food Styling & Photography Workshop is for anyone interested in learning the basics of food styling and photography for editorial purposes. We will focus on simple plating and propping of food for the most appealing photos without resorting to tricks that render the food inedible. We will also cover creative lighting techniques using natural light. Students should have a working knowledge of their camera setting. This class is limited to 6 people.

Cost: $99 (plus ticket fees)
April 28, 12:30pm to 4:30pm

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/104302

Low Light Food Photography

This evening photography workshop is for anyone interested in learning how to deal with low light situations when photographing food. We will focus primarily on using off camera speedlights to replicate a natural, daylight look for food, but also cover a few tricks for getting the best results from alternative light sources such as candle light. Students should have a working knowledge of their camera setting. This class is limited to 6 people.

Cost: $99 (plus ticket fees)
May 3, 5pm to 9pm

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/104305

Well, I’m quite overdue for our monthly remake… but better late than never.

The cookie shot seemed to be a bit intimidating (or perhaps uninteresting) to most of you, so let’s go a different route this month, with a simple green salad.

This is a shot that I took at the workshop we had with Penny De Los Santos back in December. In that class, we each had 3 assignments to shoot food that was prepared by the fantastic Springhill Restaurant in West Seattle. I haven’t talked much about that class, but that’s mostly because others have said it already. Penny is wonderful, and I simply loved hearing the stories from her travels.

The thing that Penny asked us to focus the most on was on pushing our own limits and viewing things a little differently. Shoot from a different angle, try a different lighting style, or maybe simply change your lens. I almost always shoot with either my 100mm 2.8 or 90mm tilt-shift, so for this particular assignment, I threw on the 24 to 105, a lens that Penny said she shoots with almost exclusively. Immediately, looking at the photos, I knew this was a good thing for me to do. The images looked fresh to me… a nice break from shots that sometimes I feel that I have shot a hundred times.

Anyway… enough of the back-story. The assignment is quite simple. It’s a lightly dressed, green salad, in a white bowl on a white napkin on a dark surface. To give you a one more additional hint… I was shooting on a very high ISO for this because I was hand-holding and the light was not particularly abundant.

Do go ahead and make your photos diptychs that show this original photo along with your version of it on the right.

If you are new to the monthly photo challenges, head over to the Flickr group for the rules and to introduce yourself.

This challenge will run through the end of March.

Hi All! Happy Belated New Year!

Sorry for the long silence, but I’m excited to let you know that there are some big things coming up this year! For starters, I’m beginning to teach a few classes on food photography and natural food styling. These will be small, hands-on classes where we will focus more on the ins and outs of food photography (plating, lighting, lens choice) rather than camera basics.

The first class is coming right up! Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Seattle Bon Vivant, who will be hosting the workshop, a group of 10 of us will meet in downtown Seattle on February 16th. To sign up and for more details, email seattlebonvivant (at) gmail.com with a subject line of Lara Ferroni’s Workshop. The cost of the class will be $65 per person.

I’ll also be offering private one on one and small group (up to 4 people) workshops this year. For more information on those, send me some mail on what you are most interested to learn and we can talk about what works.