And just like that I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging again, mostly because I’ve been working my ass off (though it’s funny that it never seems to diminish in size).
Much to catch up on, but in the meantime I’m just going to send you over to Coco + Kelley for my latest recipe. These little tartlets are such fun to make and a real taste of early summer. 
Just back from a lovely Spring Break in San Francisco and Mexico (of which more anon) and dashing in to tell you to head over to Coco + Kelley blog, where you’ll find my recipe for rhubarb, orange and thyme crostini.
They’re a great savoury way to use rhubarb and look so pretty and spring-like. And now to get back to my unpacking. I’ll be back soon.
Last October I taught a food photography workshop with my dear friend Danielle Acken in Fowey, Cornwall (of which more in another post) and there was a lot of talk of entering the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Competition, a specialist food photography competition sponsored by Pink Lady Apples in the UK, but with global reach and prestige. I’d never entered a competition before, but I’ve been wanting to get my work out there, so it seemed like I had nothing to lose.
But you still could have knocked me down with a feather when my images were shortlisted in four different categories. What’s even more gratifying is that the images chosen represent three different facets of my work, so I couldn’t be more pleased. The shortlisted images are chosen anonymously by an international panel of incredible judges, who also choose the finalists. However, there’s also a People’s Choice finalist in each category, which is where you guys come in.
The image above, which I took at Robert Ramsay Cellars, is a pure portrait. I do love shooting at wineries – the barrels curve and bend the light like nobody’s business and when you add in a good-looking winemaker, magic happens. It’s been shortlisted in the Wine Photographer of the Year – People section, sponsored by Errazuriz and I would love you forever if you could vote for it here.
I thought I’d make an effort for the Pink Lady – Apple a Day category. I’d been seeing apple roses all over the Internet, and though it would be fun to make some with Pink Lady apples (I’ll post the recipe up later). Cue me burning a couple of attempts and then desperately trying to conjure light out of a dull January afternoon in Seattle. But in the end I got the shot I was aiming for.
The final two images are street photography/culinary travel photography pure and simple. The first one was taken in the Marais last year. I was first struck by the beautiful green of the doors and then noticed that they framed an incredibly French scene of joy in food and friendship. This one is shortlisted in the Food for Celebration category.
And finally were in this little restaurant in Tuscany, when, as we were leaving, the ‘chef’ emerged from her tiny kitchen at the back. It had obviously been hard work preparing all our meals, and at the moment she clearly couldn’t wait to see the back of us. She is in the Food For Sale category, and I love how she encapsulates the harsh realities of getting food onto our tables. She is me when I’ve been catering for a big party.
If you’d like to vote for any of the three images above, they are shortlisted in the Food section and you can vote for them here (you get one vote for Food and one for Wine) and again I promise to love you for ever and a day.
Thank you dear friends! I’ll let you know how things pan out.
If you’re remotely interested in food photography, I urge you to check out all the galleries. There is some astonishing work in there. And contributions from good friends Ilva Beretta, Danielle Acken, Sofia Plana, Sandrine Fauconnet and Melissa Love.
Occasionally developing recipes is easy. I dream up a flavour combination, figure out the technicalities, make a test version and bam! it works first time.
This, however, was not one of those occasions. This cake, that I made last winter for Edible Seattle, kicked my ass forwards, backwards and into the middle of next week. This recipe is based on a traditional Italian ‘torta di polenta’, to which I thought some seasonal rhubarb would be a lovely addition. And when you have rhubarb, then it’s not much of stretch to pair that with orange and cardamom.
What I couldn’t figure out though, was how to incorporate the pieces of rhubarb to make the cake look pretty enough to go in a magazine. Although my family will eat anything that tastes good and is vaguely cake-shaped, for a magazine you need to have somewhat higher standards.
First I tried to make it like an upside-down cake. The concentric circles of rhubarb looked pretty, but the anaemic yellow of the cake’s underside made the whole thing look like an unappetisingly pallid frittata, which I soon gave up trying to photograph. But boy was it good – with its damp, buttery richness offset by the tang of the rhubarb and citrus and the pleasing bite of the polenta.
For my next trick I painstakingly arranged the rhubarb in concentric circles on the top of the cake. It looked magnificent and my hopes were high. Until I dropped it as I was carrying it to the oven. I scraped it back into the tin (thank goodness for the five second rule) and baked it, and the family loved it because it was cake, but it wasn’t anything I could photograph.
I whipped up another cake, again made an intricate rhubarb design on the top, managed to get it into the oven in one piece and then the rhubarb design promptly sank into the cake while it was baking. All I can say is that it’s a good job this cake is so delicious.
By now I was coming up against the copy deadline. This time round I abandoned the concentric circles and made up for rhubarb sinkage by sprinkling the top with some sliced almonds. And finally I got a cake I could use. With the deadline looming and in the flat winter light of a rainy December afternoon, I managed to grab a few shots, which I felt were OK.
So you could have knocked me down with a feather when my cake somehow wound up on the cover.
You really do need to make this cake. It may not be the world’s prettiest, but when you’re curled up with a good book and a coffee on a damp spring afternoon, there really is nothing better.
The better I get as a photographer, the more I enjoy shooting people. You have to be totally in charge of your camera to shoot people successfully – to catch the intimate moments, genuine smiles and the light shining just so on their faces.
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Unlike food, people don’t sit around patiently while you spritz them with olive oil and tweak their garnishes, or spend ages futzing with the settings on your camera. You need to be able to think on your feet, make the most of the available light and instantly know which button on your camera does what, and for a long time that totally freaked me out.
You also need to create genuine rapport, to make people who aren’t used to having their photos taken relax and connect with the camera. I’m not sure I could ever do that in an anodyne studio, but I’ve grown increasingly to love taking environmental portraits of the chefs and food artisans I meet every day.
I’ve found that when people are in their natural habitat – describing and showing you the work that they love – all fear of the camera melts away, and my job as a photographer becomes exponentially easier.
Of course it helps if you have, as I did on a recent shoot at Robert Ramsay Cellars , the world’s most photogenic family, complete with tiny blonde four-year old; a female winemaker who looks like Kate Middleton, and stacks of barrels and boxes, that bent and shaped the light amazingly.
Because when you have those things, magic happens.
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The wine in those barrels is pretty magical too. I’m a particular fan of their rich, smooth Par La Mer blend. Thanks so much to the Harris family and winemaker Casey Cobble for being such great sports and making my job so very easy.
Oh how I have missed blogging.
I’ve had all sorts of beautiful (to me at least) posts lined up in my head over the last few months, but life always got in the way and they never quite made it onto the screen.
It’s partly because I’ve been lucky enough to have a ton of work. Somehow I’ve managed to parlay this food photography, recipe development, writing and content development gig of mine into an actual job, with several regular clients, including Edible Seattle, Seattle Refined and Zagat’s and a bunch of one-off gigs that have been hugely enjoyable and very rewarding (if not always financially).
I’ve also been travelling like crazy. Over the last year and a bit I’ve averaged over a trip a month, which has been total madness, but has left me with a bunch of photos and impressions I’d still love to share with you.
And other stuff has been happening behind the scenes. In October I went back to England, this time to teach a food photography workshop with my dear friend Danielle Acken in the glorious surroundings of Fowey in Cornwall. I love teaching and we’re planning more workshops together throughout the year, so stay tuned for news of those.
I’ve also been working on building my photography portfolio, rebranding my sites, including this blog, and bringing everything together under one big umbrella. I had an update meeting with my web designer this morning and I’ve been grinning with crazy excitement ever since. It’s going to be so pretty!
And I am bursting with ideas for a newsletter, a podcast, a couple of online workshops, and maybe even a quarterly magazine, that I really want to share with you.
In short, it’s time I got back to regular blogging. I hope you’ll join me back here next Wednesday.
I’ve started contributing a regular monthly recipe and photos to lifestyle blog Coco + Kelley . So click here for my recipe for Roasted Romanesco Soup with a Pistachio Pesto and Crispy Prosciutto – it’s warm and comforting enough for the tail end of winter, and pastel pretty enough for the beginning of spring.
It’s been too long once again. Not because I haven’t wanted to write, but because there are only so many hours in the day.
Summer is always a double-edged sword for me – on the one hand it’s great to spend more time with my girl, more time entertaining friends on our roof deck (the cocktail of the summer is the pistachio sour) and more time just lazing on a lounger reading beneath the stars on a warm summer night.
On the other hand it’s always a time of enormous creative frustration. The light is so amazing, the markets are groaning with the most glorious produce and the temptation to spend time time playing in the kitchen and photographing the results is so very, very strong.
But it’s been punishingly hot here – too hot to turn the oven on – camps finish early, it’s a struggle just to complete my regular work (astonishingly I seem to have pulled together a portfolio of regular clients – Edible Seattle, Seattle Refined and Zagat’s, and have been doing a lot more commercial work) and a house full of tween girls making videos to Taylor Swift songs is not very conducive to creativity.
This year that tug of inspiration, that craving to follow the muse’s siren song to the exclusion of everything and everybody else has been overwhelming thanks to two amazing workshops I’ve attended in recent months.
You already know Ilva and Jamie of Plated Stories fame. When I heard that Jamie and her husband Jean-Pierre had acquired a small hotel in Chinon in the Loire Valley I of course had to invite myself over for a visit while I was in Europe. Before very long a whole workshop was being arranged, with Ilva too, under the title ‘Finding Inspiration’.
Because obviously inspiration is hard to come by when you’re visiting the world’s most charming hotel (of which more another day) in the world’s most charming small French town (also of which more another day), under the tutelage of two incredibly patient, generous and supremely talented women and while sharing the whole experience with a bunch of other immensely talented, smart and funny photographers and writers. We ate delicious meals in Jamie’s kitchen, critiqued each other’s work, bounced ideas off each other and chatted long into the night, while our eyes and minds drank in more beauty than any eyes and minds should reasonably have the right to expect.
Was that my camera clicking from early morning until nightfall? Perhaps finding inspiration wasn’t such as struggle after all.
The summer’s second workshop blew my mind too, but in a totally different way. After reading my friend and mentor Jackie Donnelly’s write up of Seattle portrait photographer John Keatley’s Survival Guide workshop, I knew I had to attend. Even if it meant heading to St. Louis (which, as it turns out, is charming and fun, with killer ice cream and barbecue).
This time I didn’t even turn my camera on. Instead I listened as John, his wife Nichelle and his assistant Taylor told us everything they had learned about running a successful photography business. And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING. How to market yourself, how to pitch, how to bid on a project, how to invoice and even what thank you presents to send afterwards. We talked branding and direction, target markets and dream clients, got right into the weeds with finances and had our portfolios constructively and comprehensively critiqued by both John and our peers. The workshop was held in food photographer Rob Grimm’s awe-inspiring studio – it was worth the price of admission alone just to spend time in that space – and the creative energy sparked and fizzed all weekend.
This time the only pictures I came away with were a few grainy phone pics (I’m hating on my iPhone 5s with fire of a thousand suns currently) but instead tucked into my suitcase was something infinitely more precious, a small notebook with the text of every one of John’s slides, covered with all my own hastily-scribbled notes – the blueprint for growing my own business to the next level and beyond. Let’s all hope that my scribbles are actually legible.
It’s funny how inspiration strikes – a scrap of an idea here, a fleeting picture there, a story or a conversation that will lead you off in a whole new direction, changing your life in big ways and small. Chinon’s incredible fleamarket inspired me to visit the antique shops of Snohomish, where I ended up buying a set of vintage weighing scales like the ones Jamie had in her kitchen. Walking through the chateau de Chinon chatting with Ilva led me to reread a couple of biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine (who spent part of her life in Chinon) and then to watch the supremely fabulous Empire (which is based on her story – Eleanor’s not Ilva’s). My late night conversations with Stacey have inspired me to search for a studio and my portfolio reviews with John Keatley and Rob Grimm have made me want to focus more on my still-life food photography. I want to blog more and market myself more, grow my Instagram following and rebrand my website and collaborate with more people and start teaching workshops. But above all else I just want to make images and write stories. My head is currently bursting with them.
On Sunday we’re off to spend a few weeks on Whidbey Island, so I can relax and recharge and make the most of the final weeks of what has been an incredible summer here in the PNW. But come September 9th when school finally goes back, I’m SO ready to put all this pent-up inspiration to good use.
The images in this post were made in Jamie’s apartment under Ilva’s watchful eye. Through their blog posts and Facebook updates those two inspire me every single day. (Here is their take on the subject of Inspiration).
There are some days when I just adore this photography gig of mine.
I met Holly from Captive Spirits Distilling at the Seattle Street Food festival, where she was handing out samples of their Bourbon Barreled Big Gin.
For those of you who aren’t into artisanal gins (which are booming in the Seattle area at present) then you should rectify that immediately. This stuff was insanely good – golden, citrusy and buttery smooth with smoky undertones of bourbon – and it makes for awesome cocktails. It seems that the rest of the world likes Captive Spirits’ gins too as they won some big deal awards last year, including a Gold Medal for Best Contemporary Gin in the International Wine & Spirits Competition for the Bourbon Barreled Big Gin, making it the first American gin to EVER win in the gin category. Their unaged Big Gin took a Silver in the same competition.
Captive Spirits’ story is all the more amazing when you realise that Holly and her husband Ben, together with their business partners and a small staff, craft the gin and market it worldwide from a small garage in Seattle’s Ballard neighbourhood, and I spent a wonderful morning there recently photographing the bottling process at the distillery.
It truly had everything to thrill a photographer’s heart – soft, creamy light, gleaming copper French stills, sparkling bottles, beardie hipsters, charming owners and Rosie, the world’s most photogenic dog. I could literally have stayed there photographing all day.
I was so inspired by their story that I pitched it to Edible Seattle which resulted in me taking the portrait above of Ben, Holly, Rosie the dog and the stills, Jean and Phyllis.
It also led to me pitching and writing a round-up of artisan gin producers in the Seattle area for Seattle Refined. All of which appears to be leading me on a dangerous new craft spirits obsession. I will report back.
‘”I’m thoughtful when I come to class. My aim this weekend is to bring more personality and feeling to my writing and photography, to transform the sterile and soulless and help it resonate with a wider audience.
Telling stories like this doesn’t come easily to me – I’m not an emotional person – but I know that the proof of the pudding is in the story; that it’s the tale that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, that illuminates the subject and makes it come alive.
The gilded smoky scent of roasted vegetables emanates from the oven. Aran has made lunch. I fix myself a plate of roasted squash, beets and carrots, perfumed with oil and herbs and speckled with spices. The tender squash is velvet smooth, the flavours nutty, complex and cosily sweet, the subtle colours running the gamut from gold to caramel by way of saffron, ochre and honey. In contrast, an uncooked squash sits on the counter with dishes of fresh raw carrots and beets. The raw vegetables are hard, knobbly – their colours almost aggressively vibrant – subtlety is clearly not their thing.
I chew thoughtfully on the warm soft velvety squash. I know now what I need to do. Roast my stories to bring out their flavour and sweetness. Texture them with salt and herbs and fragrant oils to reveal their hidden subtleties and complexity. Knock off their hard edges and soften their crunch to make them palatable and sweet.
I take another bite. Food for thought indeed.”
Ugh. The above is a writing exercise I did at the second workshop I took last October at Aran Goyoaga’s studio with the very lovely and inimitable Tara O’Brady (check out Luisa Brimble’s fab workshop here). All I can say is that I most definitely haven’t found my ‘voice’ yet. To me something like the above still sounds pretentious and inauthentic and I have to fight the urge to be snarky even when I’m writing about feelings and emotions that are actually genuine and real. Maybe snark is my authentic voice. I dunno. The only thing I know is that this food writing malarkey is hard, people.
Tara on the other hand makes it all look easy. The author of the wonderful Seven Spoons blog, she writes with a genuine depth of emotion that I can only dream of achieving; develops all her own distinctive and tempting recipes and does all her own food styling and photography. In her house. In between looking after her kids.
She’s also an amazing teacher. We focused during the workshop on writing and photographing with intention and purpose; developing and building a connection with your audience and how to evoke atmosphere and emotions with both words and photography.
It was heady stuff and brought to us by an accomplished wordsmith, who, unlike some purely visual people, could actually explain her thought processes and ideas. If you get the chance to be taught by Tara, jump at it.
The above is a quick iPhone shot of the soup that Tara is styling and photographing above. Girl is a genius AND she’s bringing out her first cookbook later this year. Jump at that too. We saw galleys and it looks FABULOUS.
