Snow season is about to begin. It's quite pretty when the whole backyard is covered in fluffy snow.
Snow On Kodak Portra 400NC
in I Shoot Film
Great Food Photos: Marina Aurora
I don't know what else to say about these photos by Marina Aurora except for AWESOME!! When I first saw these photos I quickly remembered what my college drawing teacher told us. "Just because the piece of paper we're drawing on has borders, we're shouldn't think that we have to keep the drawing within the borders." I guess Marina's photos are sort of the opposite but in the similar idea that you shouldn't be bound by the limits of the medium. It's such a fresh way of interpreting recipes and what a photo should be.Q. Can you tell me what you’re trying to capture when you take your food photos? A. In the photographs I deconstruct different dishes into the distinct preparation phases in a single image. I want to inspire home cooking by showing the ease of making food that we often take for granted.
Q. How did you come up with the idea for your “Visual Recipes”? A. It was one of the assignments for school, in which we had to make a five-image story about a social issue, for me it was food and time. So in those five images I had my first two Visual recipes. It still took some time before I realized how well the images work just by themselves.
Q. Any obstacles while developing and executing the idea? A. It is somewhat demanding to fit everything into one image and to make sure the food stays fresh, as the process does take quite a long time.
Q. Are you the one actually prepping all the foods for the photos? If so, how did the cheese come out in your cheese recipe photo? A. Yes, I have prepared all the foods myself. The cheese is delicious, and was used in the beetroot pasta image. Cheese is a perfect example of food that we as consumers have distanced ourselves from. We are so used to buying products, that we have forgotten that it is possible to make for example cheese yourself. Q. What do you think is the one thing that has affected you as a photographer and your photography style? A. I have a background as a history and social sciences student, so that of course affects the topics I want to capture in my personal projects. All in all, I think it is a strange mix of influences and events that have shaped my style. One of the things could be my never-ending curiosity.
Q. Any photography heroes? A. One of my favorites is Jacques Henri Lartigue. I adore the curiosity and the joy of life in his works.
Q. I have never been to Helsinki, what foods should I MUST eat if I ever visit? A. Finnish food consists of simple flavors. I would highly recommend fresh fish or game together with mushroom or wild berries. One of my favorites is the traditional finish rye bred.
All photos courtesy of Marina Aurora
Paulie Gee's
Here's a guy that was able to turn his love of everything pizza into a job. He probably doesn't see it as a job. If you love what you do it shouldn't feel like a job. Known to many pizza/food bloggers simply as Paulie Gee he lives and breathes pizza. I constantly see him check into other pizza places on Foursquare and on the day that I was there he was sporting a Totonno's hat and shirt. It was great to hang out with Paulie, his son Derek and the other Paulie Gee's crew that day. I arrived around 4pm on a chilly Saturday and there was already a fire blazing in the oven. From 4 to around 5:30pm there weren't much happening besides sweeping the floor, testing a new pizza and catching game 2 of Yankees vs Rangers. Then around 5:30pm everyone started to shuffle around putting candles on the tables, getting the bar ready and checking on the fire in the oven. Right at 6pm doors opened and already 4 different parties walked in.
If you want to learn more about the man behind Paulie Gee's, check out Liza de Guia's video on Paulie.
Great Food Photos: Hong-An Tran
I have to thank Nick Solares and Slice for introducing me to the Hong-An Tran and her beautiful photos. Another film shooter, Hong-An attempts something even I can't do, shoot food photos on film! I'm still not familiar enough with all the manual settings needed to properly take a photo on a film camera. It would take me forever to decide on what shutter speed and aperture and I usually underexposed the photos. Boo... I really do believe that things do look calmer and prettier on film.Q. Can you tell me what you’re trying to capture when you take your food photos? A. Deliciousness and good company! Though I'm sure people look at my food photos for the food, I look back at my food shots to remember how much I probably oohed and aahed and groaned with delight during a meal. And to remember how much my dining companions were doing the same!
Q. When and why did you decide to take photos of food? A. More often than not, food is a communal, joyous, occasion for me. I'm with friends, or family, or sometimes complete strangers, and I wanted a way to capture that experience that wasn't simply about the food at hand (though a single photograph, out of context, can make a food shot seem like, well, food porn). Meals can tell a story about your dining companion, about you, about whether you're celebrating, or commiserating, or whatever. And so food photography was a way to remember those moments, to remember how awesome that first forkful of pie was. I started doing this around the middle of 2006, when friends gave me a digital camera as a birthday/phD gift, but I didn't start shooting food with film until the middle of 2008.
Q. Have you always been interested in photography? A. I guess so. Or at least since my early teens, anyway. My father had a Pentax K-1000 that he bequeathed to me when I was a teenager, and which I took with me to college, where I very informally worked on my black and white photography. After college, my brother got the Pentax and I got my father's Nikon FE, which I still shoot with now. I think I've always been interested in seeing photographically -- not in the sense that anything/everything has a potential to be a photograph (because you end up looking at the world as a means to a photographic end, and that just feels ... not quite right), but rather in the sense that there's so much loveliness, and off-kilter-ness, that I just want to share with others who aren't with me at the time.
Q. Do you approach a food photo differently than a non-food photo? A. Since I shoot almost exclusively with film, I think I approach food and non-food photos similarly in that I have a finite number of shots I can take (unless some benevolent person would like to pay for unlimited film and processing for me!), so I think of all possible photographs as just capturing a single moment, and that that moment can't/shouldn't last for more than a few seconds. With food, I'm usually with hungry dining companions, so I can ask them to wait for only so long before the food starts to cool down (or, more commonly, hunger gets the best of everyone's patience). With non-food photos, I am also just trying to capture something fleeting, something ephemeral: the play of light against a building, or the interplay of gesticulating hands during an animated conversation. These moments are no different than the moment where a plate of food is put in front of you, and you've got only an instant to capture that sense of grace.
Q. What makes you stop and take a photo (like when you're just walking around) A. Quiet moments. This isn't to say that I'm not into action shots, but rather that in the midst of lot of things going on in the city, what I see most distinctly are the brief instances of people, or trees, or whathaveyou, at rest. There's this moment, when I'm taking a picture of a friend, when they let their guard down just enough -- it's the tiniest of exhales -- and that's the moment I love most. I think it's possible to capture that moment in just about anyone/anything.
Q. Any food photography heroes? If not any photography heroes? A. Nick Solares over at Slice and A Hamburger Today takes glorious food shots that make me weep with hunger. (Apparently his food shots also make me mix my metaphors!) The photos are precise without feeling clinical or cold -- you can see all the details, upclose, of a perfectly cooked piece of fish, and know all the ingredients, and what you remember the most is a certain warmth in the photo: you're looking at food that's not only being eaten, but enjoyed, about 3 seconds after the photo was taken.
Q. Best meal so far in 2010? A. Oh man. There've been a lot of great meals this year! I'd have to say this one: Around noon of the day that first NYC blizzard started this past February, I had taken the day off, and my friend Mark and I went to Mile End, the Montreal-style deli in Boerum Hill. We got two of the last seats at the counter as it hit noon (when the restaurant starts to serve its smoked meat sandwiches) and the snow started to come down hard. We ordered a sandwich and a plate of poutine. I remember taking a photo, but also remember quite distinctly exclaiming something like "oh sweet jesus!" when I finally took a bite of the sandwich. Otherworldly.
The funny thing is, I still think about that sandwich, almost daily, but even though I live 3 blocks from Mile End, I haven't been back. And that's the thing with food, and food photography for me: what made that a great meal was in part the sandwich, but also the company, and the blizzard swirling outside, and this room full of folks not entirely sure that we weren't going to get snowed in. (Not the worst fate, really, with all that meat behind the counter!) And when I look at the photo I took of our meal, that whole experience is what I remember.
All photos courtesy of Hong-An Tran.
