So, with that, here’s my virtual interview with Randy for you all to enjoy!

L: I love that you describe yourself on your about page as “a weird kid” who sculpted scrambled eggs and made dried fruit portraits. Thank goodness your had a friend who suggested you go into styling! Once you had that idea planted in your head, how did you make it happen, and get your first break into the industry? What was the project, and how did it go?

Randy: My friend’s exact words were, “there must be someone making that McDonald’s hamburger for the ads, and getting paid well to do it”. We were standing in a trailer park in Aspen, Colorado. A light went off, dark clouds of depression lifted, there may have even been an actual snap of the fingers. “That’s it; that’s what I really want to do,” I thought.

Despite this epiphany, I still floundered for a few more years. In fact, I suffered terrible career crisis blues throughout my 20′s even if I was preparing perfectly for my ultimate career, all along, without knowing it. After only a couple of years of college, I worked in a multitude of restaurants, upscale Chinese, Italian, Indian, a sushi bar, a famous New Your deli restaurant… you name it. I usually waited tables, but I was sincerely interested in the food, and I always could cook what I saw being made in the kitchens. I also did my own catering jobs, but I knew I didn’t want to be a waiter, “when I grew up”, and I knew I didn’t want to be a caterer.

I began taking snap shots of my own meals using a tripod and my first SLR, which was helpful, and eventually after returning from Manhattan to my native San Francisco, I contacted established food stylists and began assisting. Simultaneously, I was working with aspiring photographers on test shots for our mutual portfolios. Eventually I had a few decent images to show, some technique under my belt, and the confidence, to print a business card and promote myself.

My first paying job as a full-fledged food stylist was a shrimp tostada bowl, shot for a small local Mexican restaurant chain. Imagine my disappointment when the image appeared on the coupon flopped 180 degrees. Though I’m sure no one else could tell, the garnished plate just didn’t look right to me.

Landing steady work at a large studio that shot Macy’s newspaper inserts on a daily basis also helped me transition from assistant to primary stylist. A steady diet of arranging and accenting kitchen appliances and cookware sets, though boring at times, taught me a lot about photo composition.

You’ve now been styling for quite a while… how has the industry changed? Is the work you are doing now much different than what you were doing 20 years ago?

Dramatically. When I started out, naturally it was pre-digital; food was shot on
4×5 or 8×10 film. Retouching was expensive, and almost never a part of the budget. We would save hero plates of food until the film came back from the lab, and quite frequently we would have to re-shoot something from earlier in the day, for crazy reasons. Maybe there was dust on a knife, or a Polaroid accidentally was left on the set within the frame.

Styles were also very different. Focus was invariably sharp throughout, and food was often shot in implausible settings, perhaps on a glossy black surface or plate; that was considered contemporary. Rusted metal surfaces though not the most appetizing setting for food, for a time, also seemed quite in vogue. Even for editorial shots, we prepared food in a stiffer less natural manner, usually cooking each ingredient separately and then reassembling the various components on the plate.

I also had to endure the extremely popular, but often distasteful, Hosemaster craze. For those of you who don’t know, Hosemaster, was/is an expensive fiber optic light painting tool, that, for a time, every photographer and their mother felt compelled to own and operate. It made food glow. Each exposure could take as much as a minute or two, and required photo assistants to often act as recording secretaries, jotting down each step of the procedure. Imagine all of the perfect cilantro garnishes I had to replace, once they died, for ones that were maybe not as good.

The current trend of natural light, selective focus and plausible environments, is having a good run, and I couldn’t be happier or more comfortable. It’s hard to imagine what the next phase might be.

What are your 5 best tips for making a successful shot?

Have an assignment.
When working on a self-promotional shot, I find it’s easier to have some parameters, perhaps a recipe to start with. It can be very hard to do “whatever you want to do, as long as it’s the most beautiful shot in the world”.
It is this pressure, which often prevents a test shot from being portfolio material.

It’s easy to have your head turned by every pretty vegetable at the market.
The tendency may also be to try to cram in to the shot every trick in the book (the textured crusty bread, with grill marks, the oozing cheese, the crumbs on the plate, the piece of parchment paper…). It doesn’t necessarily all add up to be an effective shot.

Keep it simple.

Don’t try too hard (easier said than done).
Often it’s best to plate food, throw down the napkin, or arrange the props the way you normally might, if you were serving your family, without thinking too, much, and then, make adjustments or do some problem solving from there.

If you find you’re efforting too much or really stuck, it may be useful to disrupt the pattern, by taking a walk around the block, turning up the music, screaming with all you might into a roll of paper towels… whatever will change the dynamic.

Collaborate.
The most exhilarating, and fruitful days come from those where a rich exchange occurs between the photographer and stylist. I invite comments and suggestions on the food, and appreciate the invitation to have some input on the light, focus and camera angle. When the light or focus looks really good, I make a point to complement the photographer, knowing I certainly appreciate encouraging words.

Now how many was that?

What is your most coveted tool on set? How about at home (and do you cook at home?)?

Chopsticks. I rely on them heavily for maneuvering both large pieces and flecks of food. Unlike with tweezers, I can even move a chunk of avacado without leaving an impression.

Even after a long day at a studio, I often surprise myself by cooking up some of the shoot leftovers, when I get home. Fortunately, there are also days when I return to my wife’s fine Japanese home cooking. Having a propane grill close to the kitchen is great, and saves having to clean a broiler pan.

What’s the most challenging thing you’ve had to style, and how did you do it?

Not too long ago, I did a Schlitz t.v. commercial that can be seen on my website, requiring the perfect beer pour. The huge motion camera, mounted on a dolly, and I guess using a very short lens, was right up against the table, and the beer bottle and glass were surrounded entirely by a fixed corral of plexi, making the set impossible to reach. With help from the crew, I screwed a plastic pitcher to a wooden pole, and was able to pour accurately with it using a stand and knuckle, acting as a bridge.

Some of my own self-inflicted projects also come to mind. There was the chocolate-dipped telephone, and the fully dressed and bronzed Thanksgiving turkey, cut open to reveal a profusion of metal gears, lights and stuff. I hollowed out one of the breasts of the raw bird, and spray painted the inside of the cavity with flat black paint to make the hollow appear more cave like, before adding the bells and whistles.

Do you ever get the urge to get behind the camera yourself?

I do still love taking food photographs for myself, and I’ve learned a lot from all of the brilliant people I’ve worked with over the years, but professional food photography jobs usually require a team, and I know where my strengths lie.

Do you read any food blogs? If so, what are some of your favorites?
I sincerely love yours, Lara, for it’s interesting and beautiful content, handsome design, and fun, light voice.

mattbites.com is another one, I recently discovered, that has all that going for it, too.

And finally, stolen from James Lipton: What is your favorite word in the English Language?

“What’s your availability” always has a nice ring to it.

Thank you Randy for sharing a little of yourself with us! (and no, I didn’t pay him to say he liked my blog<g>)

Photo by Thomas Barwick

As luck would have it, I also got to spend a bit of time this morning with one of the local Seattle photographers whose work I’ve been drooling over for the last six months or so. Thomas Barwick’s work really struck me in the November issue of Seattle Magazine. All of his photos in the issue (as well as subsequent issues…) have been beautiful, but the one that really grabbed me was a photo of well worn hands all covered in dark soil holding out a selection of cranberry and string beans… brilliant pinky purple speckled pods hiding a few dappled beans. Simply gorgeous. So, being the goof that I am, I googled to see if he had a portfolio, and popped off a piece of mail asking if he’d indulge me in a little chat over coffee. It took a few months for him to find some time in what sounds like a very nutty schedule, but everything finally fell into place this week, and we chatted for a bit at El Diablo Coffee, in the Queen Anne area of Seattle.

Now, before I continue, I should preface that:

a) I’m not a good interviewer. I ask questions in random order, as I think of them (even though I had done a bit of work to pull together a printed list of questions) and I don’t take notes (even though I bought a little digital recorder, I just feel weird using it).
b) Tom warned me in our first email exchange that he is a bit curmudegeonly and doesn’t interview well. He also said that when he talks about photography, he might not sound like other photographers, who talk about passion and creativity. Those are all fine and good, but he’s a bit more focused on the business end.

Given my focus for the past few weeks, that sounded perfect to me. Plus, I in the spirit of a negative times a negative equals a positive, the fact that I don’t interview people well and he doesn’t interview well, turned to out be a comfortable conversation that had no problems covering the full hour we had. I found Tom to be thoughtful and honest about his work and photography as a business, and despite his protestations, not particularly all that cynical.

A little background on Tom. He’s been in the business for 17 years, after leaving university and finding that he could start to make a living at it. After assisting in several locations for about five or six years, he started working on his own, with the notion that he’d see where it took him. If the business kept improving, he’d keep at it. And every year, that’s what’s happened. “So far,” he adds with a little grin. Tom’s work is about 20% food, some in the studio and some on location, and he clearly has a knack for it. But unlike a lot of other food photographers, he isn’t obsessed with food (and rarely cooks)… he’s more passionate about the image… how it’s composed, how it’s lit, whether it strikes him with a “Wow” factor. He can’t rattle off a list of photographer inspirations, but instead talks about images that inspire him, or make him think “Damn, I should have done that!” Much of his business is stock photography, which has been quite successful for him, namely because when he shoots, he makes a point to find a new angle or something different… whether its making spears of asparagus appear to dance or creating a cocktail image that feels that it’s been ripped from a Hopper painting.

Tom shoots with a Phase One back on a Hassleblad P30 (drool…) and while admits to not being a tech-guy, rattles off numbers of terrabytes he fills up in a year and RAID arrays with ease. His shop is completely digital at this point, and he shared some very interesting insights on digital photography, which were quite a bit different than you might hear from other photographers… that digital now produces higher quality images than he can get with film, and it’s faster in someways… but that film production was quite a bit cheaper than digital. Between post-production time and archival, costs and time add up quickly.

Photo by Thomas Barwick

Tom has been thinking a lot about what is going on with the business, particularly to photographers who are in the middle. Like many businesses these days, on the high end, there are some (although few) really amazing opportunities and photographers who produce some truly fantastic work. On the low end, the growing sector, there are more and more people taking shots and selling them either as one-offs or as stock for less-than-profitable fees. The middle is rapidly disappearing… and in the past, that’s where a bulk of the professional photographers made their keep. Each year, the business changes a little bit more, and it’s hard to predict where it will go from here.

As I’m entering the field, certainly in a very different place then Tom– I’m one of those people that John Harrington would likely dub a “trust-fund” photographer, which is to say, while I don’t have a trust fund, I don’t need a full-time job to pay the bills– and I’ve set what, at the time, I thought were particularly reasonable rates. I don’t think my rates are so low that they hurt other photographers, but I also don’t think they are so high that I price myself out of beginner level jobs. But, I start to wonder if I’m right. Or, really, if there even is a right.

When you are just starting out as a photographer, it’s nearly impossible not to lose money on jobs, but at some point, that creates problems for everyone involved… clients get the wrong expectation about what the real price of photography is, the photographer can’t keep it up and has to raise rates at somepoint as skills improve or at least as equipment needs upgrading. It’s a fascinating issue… one I’m sure has been around for a long time, but seems to be more in focus these days with digital cameras and a sense of crowd-journalism… that is, people are taking photos of everything, everywhere. In someways, it isn’t a lot different than the debate over food criticism being done on blogs versus traditional media by professional reviewers. I love that Tom doesn’t spout out an answer or even imply that there is one… he’s unsure of what the industry is going to do next, but still hanging on and curious to find out. With images like his, I’d put my money on him sticking around for a while…

Technorati Tags: Photography

Dessert Parfait
Photo © Mike Jensen
Taste of the NFL cookbook, a fundraiser for hunger relief
Styling by Lisa Golden Schroeder

For quite some time now, Lisa Golden Schroeder, one of the food styling industry masters, and I have been trading phone calls and voice mails, trying to find some time in both of our busy schedules to chat about the business. The thing that separates Lisa from other stylists, a part from her obvious talents, is her commitment to the styling community and a strong belief that helping others in the field is good for everyone. In addition to talks and classes on food styling, Lisa runs Foodesigns.com, a website dedicated to issues and resources for food stylists and photographers as well as periodically publishing The Tweezer Timesâ„¢ with some of the most helpful styling tips you’ll find.

Luckily, I was able to pull some questions together for a little virtual interview that we could both work on as time permitted. Since there are other articles out there on Lisa, as well as a great “Lisa FAQ” on Foodesigns.com, I skipped over a lot of the more basic questions, and jumped right into the meat of the interview.


SLW: What are your favorite types of jobs as a stylist, and how often do you get to do those?

Lisa: My favorite jobs are editorial, i.e. shots that are very natural and real, with little intervention beyond preparing the food well and creatively composing/presenting it for the camera. I love when I can closely collaborate with the photographer with few parameters, which tend to be a natural (and necessary by definition) aspect of advertising photos. It seems to go in spurts as to when these kinds of jobs come up—and more and more I’m developing projects from the recipe beginnings and taking my own work into photo. I currently am working on a new web project for a client that is relying on my experience to develop menus/recipes and photos for the concept. So I actually am hiring a photographer I like to work with and setting up the shoot—this is the best kind of job from my perspective! And I wish I could do them all the time, but advertising and packaging jobs also have the biggest budgets—so this is the bread-and-butter work we all have to do.



SLW: What advice would you give someone who wanted to become a food stylist? As someone starting out, are there any organizations you’d encourage them to investigate?

Lisa: I’m a huge advocate of connecting with other colleagues—going beyond the cliché “networking” stuff. I think that the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) is a good organization to start out with, but local culinary/photo groups are essential to knowing what’s going on in your own marketplace (think about joining a local art directors club or going to seminars offered for advertising or other creative professionals—you never know who you’ll meet). The IACP has a special interest section for stylists and photographers and offers access to thousands of culinary professionals (from marketing communicators and corporate food businesses to cooking teachers and chefs) all over the world. The ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) just launched a food photo specialty section too. With the web the world has become so much smaller in many ways, yet we still need to connect personally with other people in our own backyard. What you do, with your local group that gets together to go out to shoot in markets, etc. is absolutely fabulous. We can be friendly competitors and supporters of each other—I’ve found that the more I give to colleagues and wannabes in this industry, the more I’ve received myself. I’ve “fallen” into jobs or opportunities that probably would never have happened if I wasn’t engaged in trade groups and even recommended others for jobs—that have eventually led to other opportunities. You’ll find that being connected on lots of levels in your business community will establish you as a good “go to” person for information and a trusted person to successfully complete a job.



SLW: Who inspires you?

Lisa: I’m inspired by so many colleagues that share their expertise and care about their profession, beyond the work they do (Julie Hettiger, Dan Macey, Jim Scherzi, and others in the IACP who have volunteered so much on behalf of all of us). But that being said, I’m particularly fond of work done by woman photographers and stylists. I’ve come to realize that teams of closely in-tune women do some of the most beautiful food work—that’s sensitive and compelling. Donna Hay and Petrina Tinslay (Sydney, Australia), Joyce Oudkerk-Pool and Pouké Halpern (San Francisco), Deborah Jones and Sandra Cook (San Francisco), Mette Nielsen and Robin Krause (Minneapolis), and Beth Galton in New York City are all terrific. I love their careful touch and obvious love of food, creative propping (or ways of putting food in cultural context), and wonderfully magical lighting. Don’t get me wrong—there are fabulous male food shooters (obviously they outnumber women in the biz), but I really gravitate towards work that women have happened to create.



SLW: As a stylist, you spend a lot of time working with food photographers. What make that experience great for you? What makes it terrible? If you had one piece of advice for food photographers, what would you tell them that would help create better work?

Lisa: I admire the amazing vision of good photographers—and the technical aspect of what they do. They are truly artists as well as technicians, and it’s very fulfilling to work with photographers who are real collaborators. The ones who value the skills and talents that stylists bring to the party—and who know that we can make their work sing. What I would advise any photographer trying to build up the food side of their business is this: please understand the soft boundaries of job responsibilities. I won’t move your lights (unless you ask me to) and you don’t touch my food (unless I give you permission). We have to work as a team, respecting each other and what we each need to do. A terrible shoot is when the photographer doesn’t understand or care about this and who won’t communicate well with the stylist.

Zucchini Salad
© John Mowers
for Lifetime Fitness magazine
Food Styling by Lisa Golden Schroeder

SLW: It seems that there has been a trend towards more natural styling. Some stylists I’ve talked to (ok, one of them!) avoids doing anything to the food to make it non-edible, including things like cooking the meat till it’s actually done, no glycerin, etc. How much of this are you seeing? And, maybe more importantly, where do you think the styling world is going next?

Lisa: I completely agree with what you’ve heard and seen—there is definitely a move towards capturing food in a more natural, less contrived way. Take a look at the most recent Bisquik boxes—the stack of casually stacked pancakes, with a very unstyled drizzle of syrup. Really quite nice for packaging…and a wave of the future. I’ve never used non-edible ingredients to style (petroleum jelly is probably the sole exception, though I usually use clear gel now instead—I’ll use it as “glue” for patching crumbling pie crusts, etc.) I used Zap-a-gap glue for the first time in my career just a few months ago—on a spiral-cut ham that was totally falling apart. And I only had the one ham to use for an advertising shot! So what do you do? But I generally avoid all the weird tricks some stylists seem to love—but the really good ones are moving away from that (if they ever used any of them). But sometimes it’s important to use methods that create a look that people expect–cooking some meats/poultry until they are completely done means that their “camera life” is significantly shortened. This is okay if shooting editorially, but for advertising it can be an obstacle if the client, art directory and/or photographer cannot shoot quickly enough to capture the food at its most appetizing point. Every job is so different, and the parameters/needs/goals of each shoot demands different problem solving. And if you can work completely “green” (the way most food is shot in Australia, by the way), I think it’s the way we all need to move. But that means that clients need to adjust their expectations. 



SLW: OK, here’s the question everyone asks… can you give us a couple of styling secrets for those hard to style foods?

Lisa: Really, what a really good stylist does is take TIME to carefully and artfully present food for the camera. Any accomplished home cook can make their food look just as appetizing, if they think about color, contrasting shapes and textures and take time to consider the best moment in the food’s “life”. That being said, it’s our job to control everything, so all the pre-production, planning and prep can be the secret to styling difficult foods. Ice cream melts—so if you don’t want it to, what do you need to do to prevent this from happening? It can be hard to scoop if extremely cold—so to what temperature should it be “tempered” to make scooping easier? Melting cheese also changes quickly—how can you make it melt slowly and keep it looking fresh even if it needs to stand for a few minutes (a little steam works wonders)…a good stylist understands HOW food works, so they can predict an outcome and possibly intervene or change the outcome to work in favor of the camera.

SLW: In photography, I get the sense that more amateurs (self included!) are taking on jobs and changing the way companies are using and paying for images. You see this a lot in the stock and news industries, where good quality stock photos are selling for $1 a piece, rather than the thousands they used to. Is this kind of thing happening in the food styling world as well with the introduction of home cooks into the publishing space through blogs? Or, do you see photographers picking up the styling duties as well?

Lisa: I think that the increase in access to images has certainly caused a certain flooding of the market, depressing rates for commercial work. But for so much of advertising and editorial work, new commissioned work is still the best solution. Home cooks obviously do not have the level of professionalism that trained cooks/stylists have, but they offer a new level of accessible information about cooking and food to consumers. But there is also a lot of misinformation out there—I cringe when I see someone explaining why something happens with a recipe that is totally incorrect. And I’m not seeing much amateur food styling going on, beyond cooking web sites/blogs where people shoot in their kitchens to document their stories. BUT I think it’s wonderful to see such an interest in food and cooking, in an era of highly processed food, not enough time for families to sit down together to eat, and the increase in diet-related illnesses. I do not think that there will be a huge increase in photographers doing their own styling any time soon. It’s just too hard—as you’ve probably figured out. With smaller jobs it’s possible, but if a photographer wants to take on serious advertising jobs (where the money is), it’s too hard to juggle the photography, client, etc. PLUS actually style the food. But there’s a place for all food images—it just depends on the purpose of their use or their final goal. What quality do you need to illustrate raw meat in a grocery store circular that will be thrown away as soon as the coupon is clipped out? Sometimes down and dirty is perfect, while at other times it’s important to create work that can stand the test of time. I’m not saying that amateurs only create lesser-quality work, but you know that it takes time and experience to become accepted as a professional.

SLW: How about stylists turned photographer… do you ever get the urge to click the shutter yourself?

Lisa: Well, I actually do sometimes, but I would never put myself out there as a photographer! No, I see more photographers interested in the styling end (but more to make themselves better collaborators with stylists) and sometimes moving to styling full time. Iris Richardson, who started out as a chef, styles, but considers herself primarily a photographer now—but what I see when this happens is that either the photography or the food is compromised. One exception is on the more artistic end of things. Nir Adar, a stylist and food “artist” is a really good photographer. But only for his artwork, he doesn’t do it commercially for client products. As a stylist, I know it helps my work to really understand how the camera eye sees and to experiment with lighting, camera angles, etc. But I like to stick to the food side of the camera most of the time.



SLW: Tell us a little about foodesigns.com. What made you start the site and how long have you been running it?

Lisa: I was a stylist for years, with no on-going professional resources. I had been volunteering for Food on Film®, the only large seminar for food styling techniques (that is now defunct) for years. But otherwise there was no place to go for information. By 2000, I was styling part-time because I had little kids at home, and decided to launch a web site about food styling. I named it Foodesigns.com after my business name (Foodesigns Culinary Consulting) and launched it at the 2001 Food on Film® seminar. It’s been a work in progress and has gone through 2 re-designs since its first version. I’ve spent thousands of dollars and more hours than I can count on it—and it basically generates just enough revenue to pay for itself. But I love it and it coincided with the IACP approving the special interest section for stylists and photographers—so all of a sudden we had a community for all of us strange, independent photo professionals. Working in such a niche part of the business, it became a relief to have colleagues in other parts of the country (and world) to talk to and share with. A few years ago, when I was going through the first re-design, and after dropping the Style Share message board (which never really caught on), my designer told me I HAD to blog on the new site. At that time I didn’t really know much about blogging—and I was writing a 50-page publication quarterly (The Tweezer Times™) and couldn’t imagine having any more time to casually journal online every day or week. So I let the idea go…but see below!



SLW: Foodesigns.com has some good interviews with professionals in the food-art community. How do you decide whom you are interviewing? Ever have anyone decline?

Lisa: I’ve been really blessed over the years—because of the site I’ve “met” hundreds of people from all over the world. And gotten to know them via e-mail and telephone—and actually met some of them in places like South Africa, Australia, and London! Everyone has been extremely generous about interviews and allowing me to use their photos on the site. I think this is because I’ve always kept the site very independent—remaining a resource for everyone and supporting everyone in the business. I’ve chosen people that interest me—that are doing work that I admire or have an approach to what they do that is different from my own experience. I acknowledge that I have a very specific experience in this business that doesn’t reflect every other stylists’ out there—and I’ve always striven to find new voices to share what they know.



SLW: Where do you want foodesigns to go from here? Would you like to be more of a collaborative effort, with different people posting their own ideas, or do you think you’d prefer to keep it more managed? Do you think it will stay more of an informational website, or do you think it might start becoming more of a free-form blog dedicated to food styling?

Lisa: Your timing is perfect on this question. Because the site had grown like an octopus over the years, I’ve finally been knocked on the head that I’ve gotten too ambitious for someone sitting in her little office, trying to run the site, create new content, take photo bookings, and raise three kids! This cyber attack I’m overcoming made me realize that I want to keep the site going, but I need to focus on what I really like to do. And that is to write about issues that will help all of us in this styling community. The directory had become a security risk to the site and was taking too much technical oversight—so I’m hoping that it will be continued eventually at the IACP web site. And posting regular huge issues of The Tweezer Time™ has become a burden, rather than the joy it was when I first started it (I know I could make it smaller, but never could really do that). So I’m actually moving towards a more blog-like format. I’ll still maintain control of the content, solicit articles and submissions from other professionals, and keep the content objective and journalistic integrity (my original schooling was nutrition/food science and journalism, so I finally found a place to use my writing skills). I love blogs (yours and Heidi Swanson’s are my favorite), and they are evolving too. But what I see happening with The Tweezer Times™ is that it will become like a newspaper. I’ll be able to post new articles daily/weekly as they are ready to print, without the stress of quarterly deadlines. The beauty with the new format is that I can categorize postings for searching. So if a reader wants info about a specific technique, they can look for it. And for now, I’ll ask for specific feedback from readers, but won’t have an open forum—as I’ll still sell subscriptions and have secure access for subscribers. I think that there are starting to be more places for the free-form blog, so I’d like to keep Foodesigns.com/The Tweezer Times™ as an objective resource (though a little biased by what I think is important for professionals or students to know). But we’ll see…I’ve learned that I need to stay flexible because the business is flexible and the needs of this community will change as the future of commercial photography changes.

SLW: Ok. Now my favorite interview question: What should I have asked, but didn’t?

Lisa: I’ve become a real nut about education—there’s been a very steady increase in interest in food styling and food photography over the past 5 years. Culinary students are interested, career changers are interested, the media is interested! So another good question is this: What is the future of professional development in this little corner of the commercial photo business? Food on Film® used to be the ONLY place to go to learn from other professionals, then Delores Custer (the Julia Child of food styling!) started teaching at the Culinary Institute of America. Otherwise there are still few places to learn about the business, what it takes, and how to learn it. Many of the established, veteran stylists learned on the job, assisted, or apprenticed with another stylist. That’s still a good way to break in, but the business has changed. Budgets are tighter, the way jobs are booked is in transition. You can’t run your portfolio around town then sit back and wait for the phone to ring. So if you want to get into the biz, you need to consciously invest in yourself. Find classes, workshops, offer to do things that might open doors to potential clients or jobs. I’ve started teaching workshops periodically and now coach/teach online classes that shed light on what this career is all about. I encourage wannabes to be sure they have the cooking skills they need, to take art/color theory classes, to travel, to read magazines about design, fashion, architecture, gardening! Anything that will help hone their creative eye and inspire their own special way of presenting food. I used to have a client that could tell if I styled something by the way I garnished their product. And this was a good thing!

Lisa will be one of the hosts for the upcoming International Conference on Food Styling and Photography at Boston University in early June. You can also find her latest class info on Foodesigns.com.

Technorati Tags: Food Styling, Photography

If there was one thing (and there were many!) I learned from my experience meeting with MatthewA, it’s that I am not a particularly good interviewer. Particularly when I’m surrounded by food and cameras and dishes and linens and people making gorgeous images, I tend to just get lost in the moment and forget the fact that I’m supposed to be asking questions. So, when I scheduled a chat over coffee with Kelly Cline, one of Seattle’s up and coming food photographers, I knew I’d need to do a bit of advanced preparation in order to avoid just oooing and ahhing over her natural talent. Kelly and I had already shared several conversations over email, and her fun and energetic personality meant that I was going to have to work hard to keep our interview from turning into two hours of foodie girl talk. Especially since the LightSource interview that was recently podcast gave me so much insight into her work already. So, I planned out my questions, printed them out and even remembered to bring them with me! Of course, that didn’t stop us from sounding like teenage girls at the mere mention of truffle oil or one of our favorite food photographers. I still tended to get swept away in the conversation, so our time felt more like sitting down with a new friend than an interview. But, somehow through that, I did manage got get through all of my questions, and learned a ton about Kelly in the process.

While there are many food photographers who churn out gorgeous images, Kelly Cline’s images are different. Kelly loves food and has a unique ability to show that visually with light. Maybe that’s because her food is natural and never faked. Partly driven from her belief that food that will look the most beautiful and delicious on film is food that is beautiful and delicious in real life and partly driven by practicality (How can I tell my husband that he can’t eat that gorgeous steak that I spent good money on?), Kelly avoids those well-known food stylist tricks that you read about like using glycerin for water droplets or mashed potatoes for ice cream. Her food is simply good food. The ice cream she shoots looks like ice cream because it is. She’d rather make a feast of three turkeys that are completely edible to get the perfect shot, rather than partly cook one and paint it with Kitchen Bouquet and throw it in the trash.

Which brings me to another key difference with Kelly’s work… not only is she the photographer, she is also the food stylist, prop stylist and recipe author. Working that closely with every aspect of the process presents challenges, but also means that Kelly deeply understands the food and is able to bring that to life in her photos. Each shot may only take a few minutes to capture, but that represents hours and hours of Kelly’s planning and prep time. As a result, a good day will yield only four or five final shots. But those few photos will be fresh and full of life as Kelly collapses on the couch exhausted.

If this sounds familiar, it may be because Kelly’s process is more like that of a food blogger (which she is too) than a typical professional photographer… she wakes up excited about an idea of what to cook, maybe based on one or two seasonal ingredients or inspired by one of her many cookbooks (The Asian Cook by Terry Tan being one of her favorites), and gets busy creating. Her studio is her (tiny!) kitchen and a room in her house in West Seattle that happens to get beautiful eastern and western light. She can spend hours lost in cooking magazines, drooling over the photos. Her props are finds from Value Village and garage sales. She (along with her friends and family) actually eats what she shoots. It’s just that she is much better at it than most of us. And, she’s managed to turn it into a career through a combination professional assignments and stock photography.

Kelly is largely a self-taught photographer. While she started shooting at around 13 and taking a photography class here and there, she has no formal education. Instead, she has learned through experience, mimicking shots she found in magazines and cookbooks and practicing over and over again until she got the light and focus just right. She’s brought along one of her first food shots to show me how far she’s come, a blurry underexposed shot of cupcakes that look like they are a mile away and we share a laugh at how far she’s come. When she met her husband, a portrait photographer, she began to discover that food photography can benefit from many of the same lighting techniques, especially when it comes to using natural light and bouncing it to create just the right highlights and reflections.

As she starts to talk about light, Kelly starts to get notably more excited. She describes one scene of grapes she was shooting for a client. She washed the grapes with a soapy water, leaving some of the soap on the grapes to help hold the water in droplets. Using a silver bounce and natural evening light, the grapes simply sparkled. “The light was like diamonds,” she explained. “Plus, all I had to do was just rinse them off when we were done shooting and we could eat them.” As we start talking about other photographers that Kelly admires, this theme of light continues. Some of her favorites, Antonis Achilleos, Matthew Kline, Noel Barnhurst and Iris Richardson, all manage to capture this same brilliance of light.

Of course, Kelly also sees a lot of food photography that makes her shudder. I asked what she thought the major problems with most food photos, both amateur and professional. She’s not a fan of faked food shots that tend to look plastic and too perfect to be real. She even criticizes her own work at times, calling out one or two photos that she spent time adjusting the baby basil leaves just so to catch the light, only to decide to reshoot later because they looked unnatural. She also sees a lot of problems with exposure, both under and exposing images. Her own tendency is to over expose, a habit she’s developed from too many images that came out under exposed. Once again, she easily laughs at her own tendencies to do this even though she knows better. She also cringes with presentations that are overly complicated or include irrelevant props. Why would someone put a potholder into a shot with fresh fruit? This is one thing that I never see happen in Kelly’s photos… her composition is always elegant and simple. The food provides the energy and color and the props only help make the food the focal point. To bring more life or action to the shot, Kelly will play with the light or the angle, instead of unnecessary props.

But, the biggest issue Kelly sees, particularly for new photographers, is properly setting and correcting white balance. As a result, many of the food photos on Flickr that she sees have color casts to them. Kelly avoids this problem by shooting a white card before each shoot. This image is then used to set the white point, and it’s simple to adjust the next images from that curve. Regardless of the type of light, her whites are neutral. If she wants to make the image warmer or cooler, she is in control of exactly how much.

The two of us proceed to geek out most of the rest of the conversation, talking about DOF (shallow!!! but not too shallow!), lenses (we both love the 50mm), camera bodies (pining for a 1DS Mark II) before we both realize that our parking is about to expire and decide to call it a day.

Later, Kelly emails me, saying that she can’t believe that she didn’t mention “the bane of food photography,” on-camera flash. “It’s terrible,” she says. “Every on-camera flash should be ripped off of it’s camera because it makes the ugliest and unflattering light.” She also notes that one of her other sins is, on occasion, simply pointing and shooting without much thought to the composition. “I don’t know why I do it… maybe boredom or maybe sheer laziness… however you slice it I die a little inside when I do and I die a little more when those shots come out good because I know I didn’t really do anything to get it and that it was pure luck.”

Planned successes or not, it’s hard not to be impressed with Kelly’s body of work and I think her natural style is very representational of the direction of food photography. There is beauty in the honesty of natural styling that is lost when the food is forced to be something that it isn’t. A great food photographer and stylist knows how to bring out the flavor without draining the life out of the food. Kelly gets that and her photos are all the more mouthwatering because of it.

In addition to her online portfolio, you can find Kelly’s work on Flickr and iStockPhoto.

Technorati Tags: Food, Food Styling, Photography