Well, I’m quite overdue for our monthly remake… but better late than never.

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.

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.

Back in the good old days of 2007 I started a post series called Mailbag where I posted and tried to answer questions that I get from readers. It was a good idea, because I find myself quite frequently answering the same kinds of questions over and over. But, I never quite got around to making that into a regular series… two doesn’t quite sound like a series does it?

For 2010, I’m going to start it up again, beginning with this question from a reader about a budget lighting:

I am an amateur photographer and enjoy taking pictures of food. Currently I’m trying to put together a family recipe book with photos.   The lighting in my kitchen is not very good. I found your blog and I read the blog post about food photography gear from 2006. My question is about lighting gear. Do you still recommend the Tota-Pak or V-Light Pak?   $200 would be about tops for my budget. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

My first recommendation, if your kitchen doesn’t have good light, would be to find a different room in your house with a window. You only need one good sized window, and a table set to its side. My kitchen doesn’t get good light either. My studio is upstairs, with windows on the south and west sides.  On sunny days, cover the window with a very sheer curtain or some tissue or vellum to soften the light or it will be too harsh.

But of course, there are still times that sunlight just won’t work, like when you are trying to shoot your dinner (or, in Seattle sometimes in dead of winter, your late lunch). So, having a nice, compact lighting set is nice to have.

The Lowell Tota’s are good lights. They worked very well for me getting started… the bulbs last a long time, they give nice soft light when used with the umbrellas, and they are pretty compact. One thing to be aware of is that these lights do get very, very hot and are somewhat easy to knock over, so be very cautious running them around small kids or pets.

The other option, which is a bit less expensive, is the Lowell Ego light system which uses standard household lightbulbs (Update: they use compact florescent, which everyone should be using now anyway! See the comments for more on the replacement bulbs). These are super easy to use, and work quite well for tabletop work. As long as that is all you are doing, I’d probably say go that way. The Tota’s are more flexible though if you want to get wider shots, like people cooking in the kitchen.

I still use natural light 85% of the time, but I’ve moved to an off camera speedlight kit (with pocket wizards) which is super compact for taking on location, and battery powered so I don’t have to worry about finding electrical outlets near where I’m shooting (something you will have to think about with either of the Lowell lights mentioned above). You can get a very simple speedlight kit for about $249. I use rechargeable Nimh batteries because they do chew through the batteries pretty quickly.

Do you have questions? Send them my way!

One of my favorite tricks is to use a simple foam-core board as a background. Set just far enough away from the subject, it will appear as a nice clean wall and cut out any clutter that is in the room (and in my studio, that can be quite a bit). Even better, several years ago I found these great poster-sized paint samples by Yolo at Seattle’s Ecohaus that have a bit of double sided tape on the back… perfect for attaching to a 2×3 sheet of foam board. Not only do they have a beautiful selection of colors, but the samples have texture to them, so they really look like a wall surface. And, they are only $5.99 each.

I’ve had a set of these for the past 4 years and used them extensively. A simple switch of a background color can make a huge difference in the feel of a shot.

My old sheets were starting to look a bit ratty, so I made a trip down to Ecohaus earlier this week and picked up 9 “new walls” for the studio… which all store away in the tiniest space between my cabinets. I’m in love with some of the new colors they are offering.

Wallpaper would work great for this too! In fact, I’m particularly intrigued by the Madison & Grow papers. The samples are only $5, but I’m not sure how big they are.

PS: Something bizarro happened last time I upgraded WordPress and it deleted all of my categories… it’s going to take a little while, but I should have things recategorized in the next couple of weeks. And, I’ll be posting a new challenge for Flickr at the beginning of February.

Hi All! Happy Belated New Year!

Sorry for the long silence, but I’m excited to let you know that there are some big things coming up this year! For starters, I’m beginning to teach a few classes on food photography and natural food styling. These will be small, hands-on classes where we will focus more on the ins and outs of food photography (plating, lighting, lens choice) rather than camera basics.

The first class is coming right up! Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Seattle Bon Vivant, who will be hosting the workshop, a group of 10 of us will meet in downtown Seattle on February 16th. To sign up and for more details, email seattlebonvivant (at) gmail.com with a subject line of Lara Ferroni’s Workshop. The cost of the class will be $65 per person.

I’ll also be offering private one on one and small group (up to 4 people) workshops this year. For more information on those, send me some mail on what you are most interested to learn and we can talk about what works.

It’s Menu For Hope time, one of my favorite blogging times of the year. Menu for Hope raises money for those the World Food Program to help feed those who are hungry. You purchase raffle tickets, for $10 each, towards donated prizes. Each $10 you spend gets you another chance to win. There are so many great prizes this year, I know you will have fun browsing through them. For a full list, see Chez Pim’s site.

Usually, I post about my offering over on Cook & Eat. But this year, I’m offering up a package I’m calling “Time to Shoot the Doughnuts!” which seemed more fitting for this blog & my newest blog project, The Doughnut Cookbook.

My package, code UW32, is for a 1 on 1 day of food photography & styling workshop in my studio. We will tackle food styling, camera and light settings and spend the afternoon practicing! The winner is responsible for travel and lodging to Seattle, WA. Doughnuts, lunch and equipment will be provided.

OR If you’d rather (because maybe you can’t get to Seattle), you can choose a personalized doughnut kit instead. This kit will including a recipe of the winner’s choice from Doughnuts before it is published, a doughnut cutter and mini doughnut baking sheet, the dry ingredients for the doughnut recipe of the winner’s choice, and a signed copy of Doughnuts once it is released. I’ll also include some online photography mentoring for 1 month.

I hope this inspires you to get out there and bid! I know that we are all on tighter budgets these days, but hunger doesn’t go away because our own funds run low.

To Donate and Enter the Menu for Hope Raffle

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Choose a bid item or bid items of your choice from our Menu for Hope main bid item list. (mine is UW32)

2. Go to the donation site at Firstgiving and make a donation.

3. Please specify which bid item you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per bid item, and please use the bid item code.

Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02 – 2xEU01, 3xEU02.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Check back on Chez Pim on Monday, January 18 for the results of the raffle.

Thanks for your participation, and good luck in the raffle!

I’ve been looking forward to today for many weeks now, as soon as I heard that Penny De Los Santos (National Geographic photographer as well as a significant contributor to Savuer) was coming to Seattle to give a talk on her work and food photography. It’s an early Christmas present for me. Last night, I had the pleasure of meeting of meeting Penny at an informal potluck welcoming her to Seattle, and she shared a few of her stories while we sat around on couches and a fire twinkled behind her. I could have sat there for hours listening to Penny. She is a delight, and I found myself quickly caught up in her passion. It’s exactly what I needed to inspire me and get me to think about my work in a new light… something I think we all need now and then.

I’ll have more on the today’s workshop later in the weekend, but until then, you should check out some of Penny’s work.

Photo by Penny De Los Santos

For this month’s photo remake, I want to pay tribute to Gourmet magazine’s fantastic cookie issues of the past. You know the ones. Cookies done up to be gorgeous graphic works of art. I have to admit I was really disappointed that Bon Appetit didn’t pick up that banner with the demise of Gourmet, so I thought perhaps you all might want to try your hand at it.

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.

I’m just back home after a weekend spent in San Francisco attending and speaking at BlogHer Food 09. What a wonderful trip! I was so honored to be asked to speak along with so many of my food photography/blogging heros… Heidi Swanson, Matt Armendariz and Todd & Diane, as well as putting faces to names of so many bloggers that I love (too many to name here!)

Matt & I finished up the visual track with a talk on Advanced Photography, which was more about workflow and some thoughts on taking your photos to the next level than f-stops and ISOs. I had an absolute blast!

If you missed the talk, or wanted to revist the slides, I’ve posted them here. The PDF file is a little on the large size, so be prepared for a bit of a slow download.

If you have other questions, as always, feel free to send them my way.

Thanks again to the folks at BlogHer for inviting me to speak!

PS – If you missed BlogHerFood, why not head to Ixtapa in January for the Food Blogger Camp? I’m thinking about heading down myself!