I got back from Rancho La Puerta (see previous post) on a Saturday, spent one night at home, then left for New York on Sunday. After a 12-hour delay – ! – I arrived late Monday night, just in time to be at the studio on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I didn’t have to be at the photo shoot for book #2. The same team – my editor Linda Ingroia, photographer Lucy Schaeffer, food stylist Simon Andrews, prop stylist Penelope Bouklas, and their assistants – did a perfectly great job on book #1 without me. But I wanted to be more a part of it, to have more ownership of the photography and, therefore, the finished book. So there I was.
We were scheduled to do 10 shots a day, food shots of recipes from the book, a ridiculous, break-neck speed even for editorial photography, which typically happens more quickly than advertising photography.
Here’s roughly how it all happened.
A couple/few weeks before the shoot, Linda and I put together the shot list – a list of the 20 most photogenic dishes, and a combo that would be pretty, appetizing, appealing, that represented a nice cross-section of the book, and that wouldn’t be too complicated to shoot, given our break-neck speed. We sent those 20 recipes to Lucy and Simon.
Before the shoot, Simon sketched out a rough order in which to shoot the dishes, based on how he could most efficiently churn them out of the studio’s kitchen. He and his assistant Dana made each dish per the recipe – no food stylist tricks like Kitchen Bouquet painted on the chicken to make it look brown or glycerin on the lamb to make it look juicy. Unlike my advertising photo shoot experience, the roast chicken was really a roast chicken. Nice.
Great moments in photography! My down and dirty photo of the wall of printouts of finished shots
Every hour or so, as another dish was almost ready, Lucy and her assistant Shane would figure out camera set-up, lighting, etc. The shots couldn’t all be the same, but they couldn’t be radically different either. You try making that happen 20 times. Not easy. They’d try it one or two different ways, hone in on something, get the food in there, noodle around with it a bit, ultimately decide it was working, then call Linda and I over for an opinion.
This will tell you how long it’s been since I’ve been on a set – nobody looks through the camera any more, or even at a Polaroid. Lucy had her camera wired up to a computer on a small, wheeled table, so she could move it around as she moved the camera around with each shot. She had a template built into the computer’s monitor so that she could show us the shot cropped exactly as it’d appear on the page in the final book. She could even go in and do a little color and focus adjusting right there and then. So, when called, we’d go gather around Lucy’s monitor. Very, very cool.
In between shots, if the next dish wasn’t quite ready yet, Linda, Lucy, Penelope, her assistant Margaret, and I would look at props and plan out the next few shots. For each shot, we needed a surface, dishware, wine glasses (one or more), and any extras, like napkins and flatware. Again, try coming up with 20 different combinations without using the same dish, surface, or other prop twice, and having them all look like they go together without being the same. Not easy. But easier with the suitcases and suitcases of options that Penelope and Margaret brought for us to choose from.
As shots were finished, we pasted printouts of them on the wall – so we could see how it was all looking together. Everything was gorgeous, and looked delicious. But beyond that, as was my hope, the shots were communicating ease and simplicity. I want everything about these books to make food and wine pairing fun, friendly, easy, and absolutely unintimidating, and I was glad I could help make that happen in the photography.
Also as the shots were finished, I tasted each dish – not what had actually been on the set, but the leftovers that didn’t make it into the shot. And I’m pleased to report that Simon’s food tasted just like mine. You never know about that sort of thing – my recipe testers reported that they enjoyed the dishes, but since I didn’t actually taste their versions, it’s hard to know if the food tasted like I meant it to. But Simon’s cooking let me know that it does. Happy, happy, happy.
Lucy was using natural light, so by 5:30 or 6, the sky got too dark and we had to call it a day. For the very last shot on Wednesday, it was so dark that she needed an 8-second exposure. We had to turn off the music and stand still – because the exposure was so long that the vibration of a beat or a footstep could jiggle the camera and blur the picture. Poor Simon could barely see the food he was trying to style! But you’d never know it to see the final photo – it looks like mid-day.
I’m sorry to say that I can’t show you any of the pictures here – they don’t belong to me and I don’t have permission. But rest assured that they’re gorgeous, seductive, appetizing, pretty, simple, and beautiful. The book will, I’m sure, be the same.
(Special thanks for Mark and Kathryn for the incredibly plush and comfy accommodations.)
