Photography Archives - Page 7 of 24

Saturday Link Love

September 29, 2012 By Paola 3 Comments

At Piebox, they create raw pine boxes designed to transport a 9 inch pie safely and easily. I may well be investing in one of these.

Inaki Aliste Lizarralde draws incredibly detailed floorplans of the dwellings in famous TV shows. The post I wrote several years ago about Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment still gets hundreds of hits a week.

In Fictitious Dishes, Dinah Fried recreates iconic food of literature in her food photography. Here’s the grilled cheese from ‘Heidi’ that sounded so delicious when I was a child.

Sheri Silver has been making fruit leather from all the excess fruit sitting in her fridge and I must do the same, since we’ve been going a little crazy picking wild blackberries recently.

Lotta Jansdotter is launching a new line at Fishs Eddy. The above invitation is from her Facebook page.

Have a great weekend! I will be going to the North West Chocolate Fest tomorrow. Anyone else got some exciting plans?

Seattle’s Great Wheel

September 19, 2012 By Paola 7 Comments

Yesterday was my birthday and for a special treat we decided to take a spin on Seattle’s Great Wheel – the new super Ferris wheel which opened this summer on Seattle’s waterfront.

It’s not quite the London Eye, but the views over downtown Seattle and Elliott Bay are just as spectacular. The sun shone for me yesterday and we were lucky enough to board just as the sun was setting over the Olympic mountains.

The Husband treated us to the exclusive, all black VIP Gondola – which was expensive but worth it I think for the super comfortable bucket seats, which for some reason made me feel much less nervous (I’m not so good with heights), the see-through glass floor and the fact that we didn’t have to share with another party. I think we also got a longer ride than others too (and some super uglyass tee-shirts).

Here’s the view down through the glass-bottom of the gondola

And here’s a gratuitous shot of some folks on the pier watching the sun going down, just because I like it really.

Seattle peeps, I highly recommend this if you haven’t been already. I understand the light show is pretty major too.

Les Jardins Macarons by Pierre Herme

September 6, 2012 By Paola 5 Comments

Since we’ve been chatting about both macarons and interesting food styling I thought I’d share the latest creations of master macaronier Pierre Herme’.

Through his online club ‘Les Jardins’ he is making a new limited edition flavour macaron available every month. Tragically they will only ship to the UK and Europe (which is officially NOT FAIR).

Us poor unfortunates in the US and elsewhere in the world will have to make do with gazing longingly at the breathtaking food photography of French photographer Bernhard Winkelmann or attempt to make our own using Pierre Herme’s book ‘Macarons’ which I have, but which has officially scared the sh*t out of me, starting as it does with a chapter entitled ‘Thirty Two Steps to Successful Macaron Shells’.

I’m also wondering if some of these flavour combinations aren’t in reality ‘a step too far.’ Does someone want to buy some and report back? I think I like the sound of Lime, Raspberry and Piment d’Espelette best. What do you chaps think? The full list of monthly flavours released so far is here.

Green Tea, Chanterelle and Lemon

Lemon and Caramelised Fennel

Lime, Raspberry, Piment d’Espelette

Chocolate & Lime

Violet & Aniseed

All pictures by the amazing Bernhard Winkelmann.

The End of Summer

September 6, 2012 By Paola 2 Comments

It’s a sparkly, warm day today in Seattle but the leaves are turning just round the edges, the evenings are growing cooler, the Minx and I spent yesterday picking blackberries and there’s definitely an undertone of autumn in the air.

We’re back after an incredible weekend at the Labor Day Family Weekend at Canoe Island French Camp in the San Juans and the Minx went back to school this morning. My little tiny, itty bitty scrap of a baby has just started third grade.

It’s been a wonderful summer, but I can’t wait to start a new year for me too. I have BIG PLANS and maybe this year I’ll even get to execute them.

In the meantime here are some photos of our weekend on Canoe Island. Man, that place is good for the soul.

Food Stylings: Charlotte Omnes

August 30, 2012 By Paola 3 Comments

What are you having for lunch today?

I was thinking of ham, cheese and mustard on white.

Or possibly cheese with mustard, mayo and ketchup or ham and mustard.

Followed by a selection of juicy citrus fruits.

I love it when food stylists do things a little bit differently.

All photos by ace food stylist Charlotte Omnes.

A Morning of Raspberry Macarons

August 28, 2012 By Paola 5 Comments

It is Tuesday and there are no freaking macarons in my house. I know this because for some reason I’ve been craving them all morning and a thorough excavation of my kitchen cupboards has not yielded a single delicate French confection. When the Minx goes back to school next week (may the heavens and all the saints and angels be praised), I will MAKE some.

But in the meantime all I have are some photos I took at Patisserie Camp, way back at the beginning of the summer. Sadly these will have to do.

Take it away Chef Jean-Marc.

Make a nice almondy macaron mix and colour it baby pink (I’ll put up a recipe when I’ve had a chance to make and test some, in the meantime just treat this as afternoon food porn).

Pipe hundreds of the little darlings out on a bunch of baking sheets and whip up a little raspberry jam.

Bake until crisp

Fill with jam

Sandwich them together and Robert est ton oncle. (Do Americans say ‘and Bob’s your uncle’ too? I’ve never had a clue where that comes from).

IFBC 2012 : Food Photography with Andrew Scrivani and Chef John

August 27, 2012 By Paola 5 Comments

On Friday I drove down to beautiful Portland with my dear friend Nazila, writer of the gorgeous blog Banamak and champion drunken snorer, to attend the International Food Blogger Conference. It’s the first one of these I’ve attended and I came away incredibly inspired and full of plans and ideas for the blog.

I met up with old friends and made new ones, attended incredibly useful classes, ate unbelievably good food and had some great conversations with advertisers, PR companies, ad networks and publishers. My head is still reeling from all the information I have to process.

One of the aforementioned old friends was food photographer Andrew Scrivani, who closed out proceedings on Sunday morning with a hilarious and informative cooking and photography demonstration with his good friend Chef John from Food Wishes.

A note to all the many TV executives who read this blog – these guys need their own cooking show pronto quick.

Mr S gave talked us through some of his amazing photos; an exciting dry ice shooting station was set up and the food paparazzi came out in force, with the maestro on hand to answer questions.

Chef John tortured the assembled masses by frying up a batch of the world’s crispiest onion rings (featuring a special not-so-secret ingredient), and some garlic prawns, as well as putting together a yummy-looking affogato.

Unfortunately the props didn’t last long in a room full of hungry food bloggers.

An fabulously funny time was had by all, and many pictures were taken, despite the less than ideal lighting conditions for photography.

Please get The Baldie Boys on my TV set ASAP.

London 2012: The Olympic River Part 2

August 22, 2012 By Paola 2 Comments

Here are some more photos from our trip up the River Thames during the Olympics. I’m assuming that the whole light show will stay in place now, minus the Olympic Rings of course, in which case I can’t recommend a night time visit to the river highly enough if you happen to be in London.

Magical is not a good enough word.

Here’s what we had all come to see.

But in every direction the river looked amazingly beautiful (that’s the home of the French Olympic delegation).

London Bridge has got itself a groovy new lighting scheme.

The Mayor’s Office had a laser light show featuring cyclists and tube trains amongst others.

Remember I blogged about the incredible new light show they’d installed on Tower Bridge? Well for some they flipped up the rings and then put the light show through its motions. HMS Belfast to the right also changed colour too.

And then the rings flipped back on and the Bridge turned gold to celebrate Mo Farah’s win in the 5,000 meters.

Here’s the view from the restaurant we dined at in Hay’s Galleria.

Finally, at midnight, we stopped off at the London Eye.

Slightly awesome n’est-ce pas?

Here are some more shots from my boat trip along the river.

London 2012: The Olympic River

August 15, 2012 By Paola 5 Comments

Hey honeys, I’m home!

It’s rather a long time since I blogged here isn’t it? Apologies for the radio silence but we’re just back from three weeks in Europe – two in London for the Olympics and one in the South of France for some sun.

I had all sorts of good intentions of blogging gently along the way but a) always much trickier blogging from an iPad and b) I was having too much fun (such a bad, bad blogueuse). I hope you were following along on Instagram instead.

I was so glad we went back. I was worried that the weather would be crap, it would be impossible to get around, the opening ceremony would be embarrassing and there would be all manner of chaos and craziness.

Instead, and I hope this made its way through your TV screens, London was beautiful as I have never seen it before, festive and glorious with everyone in a jolly, celebratory mood. It was, quite simply, magical.

Let’s go for a little trip upriver and you’ll see what I mean.

We’re starting at Greenwich. Home of the erstwhile Millenium Dome, which has now been reinvented as a massive concert arena, and one of the main Olympic venues. Here’s the view from the new Thames cable car. See that boat at bottom right? We’ll be going on that to wend our way up to the centre of town. Can you see the Gherkin in the distance?

While we’re waiting for the boat we have the perfect opportunity to look more closely at the Dome, and watch the people climbing the new walkway. Wish we’d had time to do this. It looked very fun.

There’s also the chance to watch a parade of tall ships going past – it must have been amazing when all river traffic looked like this.

And we’re off. Spot the tiny Gherkin to the left of the picture.

Getting closer.

This is what we came for. Also loving the newly-opened ‘Shard’.

This was quite literally breathtaking. So beautiful.

Going under the bridge. One of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done in my entire life.

More pics of magical Olympic London tomorrow.

BTW my fancy pants new camera with all its fabulous ISOs and low light photography capabilities died an ignominious death the day before we were due to leave. So all pics are taken on my little Canon Rebel XSi (450D). You could almost hear it straining.

Project 52: Freedom

July 12, 2012 By Paola 4 Comments

About six months too late I’ve just started doing something called Project 52.

Every week awesome commercial photographer Don Giannatti sets a real life photography challenge via Flickr and then does a weekly live online critique of all entries.

The most amazing thing of all is that it’s completely free, no commitment, no worries if you miss an assignment, nada. You just show up on Flickr with your picture and then tune in for the online critique later, together with a chat room full of hugely talented and hugely helpful fellow photographers.

This week’s theme was for a single shot that sums up the words Independence, Freedom or Celebration.

The pic above was my first attempt – a random cute kid at Seattle’s Golden Gardens beach.

I also like this shot from the same afternoon.