For your remake, you can use the leftovers of your choice and adjust your colors accordingly. But the shot should still be top down, and use similar light to this shot.

It’s really helpful when you use the new diptych format when you post your results!

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 December.

I think this is great project on so many levels… using a cell phone camera to snap a quick shot in the restaurant means less futzing before diving into your food… you can worry about making a beautiful photo later. It’s also a great way to learn to make the dish yourself, something I always mentally note when I’m eating out but then forget somewhere along the way. Finally, it’s a great reminder that lighting and styling plays an enormous role in great food photography!

So this month, I want to take a cue from Stephen, and have you remake a dish from a not so great photo. You can do this in one of two ways:

• Eat out, snap a quick shot, and then make the beautiful shot later or
• Find a recipe somewhere out there on the web that you want to try but that is just illustrated with a quick, unstyled snapshot, and make your styled shot from it.*

It’s really helpful when you use the new diptych format when you post your results!

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 September.

*If you do decide to create a styled photo from a blog snapshot, consider sharing it back with the original author. I’m sure there are many bloggers out there that would love a beautiful shot to accompany their post, but don’t have the time, equipment, etc. to take it themselves.

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.

This month’s challenge, which will start now and go through the end of June, is a subject very dear to me: muffins. I make muffins a lot. The particular recipe in the photo for blueberry streusel muffins comes from Lorna Yee’s beautiful cookbook, The Newlywed Kitchen.

“The Newlywed Kitchen: Delicious Meals for Couples Cooking Together” (Lorna Yee, Ali Basye)

Whether or not you are a couple, this book is full of lovely, delicious recipes that really work and I’d highly recommend picking up a copy (or giving one as a gift if you do have a wedding shower coming up). These muffins are insanely soft and fluffy, packed with fruit and just the right amount of spice.

For this challenge, you can use any sort of muffin you’d like though. I think the streusel topping gives a fantastic texture and adds visual interest, but your muffin can be simpler if you’d like. The key to this photo is the careful layering of linens, dish, parchment and wrapper, all that lead you up to that first bite. Getting a good bite can be a bit challenging because you want to make sure you hit the fruit and show a nice amount of crumb.

It’s really helpful when you use the new diptych format when you post your results! The original photo goes on the left, and your take 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 June.

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.

For this challenge, pick one of the Gourmet Magazine covers that features cookies, and remake it. Ideally, you’ll use a similar cookie, but if you need to substitute, that’s ok. You can use any of the covers I’ve included here, or take a peak back through your saved issues (or those at your local library) to pick one that you like. Just remember it has to be a Gourmet Magazine cookie cover.

When you do your remake, there’s no need to overlay the cover text, although you can if you’d like.

One more note for submitting your work, and I’d like to use this new format for all remakes… make your image a diptych with the original photo on the left and your version on the right. That will help in particular this month since we all may be doing different originals.

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 December.

The Donna Hay website has some beautifully simple shots to represent each of their seasonal menus. I love the look of the shot for fall. A simple potato shot, with peel. It’s high contrast and messy, and yet soft and clean at the same time.

Let’s see what you can do with this simple shot.

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 November.

[This shot is from the Donna Hay Website, photographer not listed]

Ok. So September kind of got away from me, photo remake wise. There are some beautiful canning jar shots in the pool that are still awaiting my comments. Despite the current lack of feedback, I hope you all learned a little about shooting transparent but reflective materials. Rather than letting October pass me by as well, I thought I’d jump right on it with the new challenge: Pie.

Pie is one of those things that seems simple, but turns out can be quite a styling and shooting nightmare. A slice standing on it’s own often requires a lot of reconstruction, or you end up with a gappy and sometimes flat mess. Not that that can’t be beautiful too. But that upstanding slice of pie that will soon be gracing magazine covers takes propping, stuffing and all sorts of fiddling.

Similarly, a whole pie, while easy to style and photograph, doesn’t give much of a hint as to what is going on inside. You have to dive in to really tempt the viewer. Take a slice out, and now you start to have something. Of course, then, you also have to start rebuilding the edges.

So, for this month’s remake, let’s see what you can do with a double-crusted fruit pie, shot top-down with a slice taken out. My pie was plum, which gave a lovely red hue, but you can use whatever fruit you’d like for your pie. But, do try to actually remake the photo including styling and lighting conditions! Just submitting any old pie photo you have won’t force you to study the image to figure out what is going on.

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 October.

This month’s remake introduces it’s own difficulties, but there is a good chance many of you are already involved in the cooking aspect already. This month, our remake is about canning. Photos of veggies or fruits in vintage glass jars can be so beautiful… but managing the reflections so you can still see the contents of the jar takes some work.

photo by Becky Luigart-Stayner

I love these Weck jars in this shot by Becky Luigart-Stayner on the Cooking Light website. In your remake, feel free to use whatever jars you have on hand, and stuff them full whatever you like. Pickling is great, as are jams or sauces. The key is to get your shot to have managed reflections that show the glass and the contents.

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.

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 July.