Food Portraits...

It's been a while since I've had to shoot a food illustration and I ended up having to shoot two on Friday. The first was a story that a reporter was doing on Mr. Mc's Peanut Brittle since the guy who runs the company and the recipe were both from Roby, one of our area towns. The problem was the company and its owner both live in Dallas and there was no way we could get someone there to shoot a photo to go with the story due to scheduling and time. So, I figured I could do something simple, go buy a bag of peanuts, put the brittle in there do a nice studio shot and go with it.

The second shot was for St. Patrick's Day. This was actually a secondary shot since I was also going to shoot Greg, the chef at Cypress Street Station also working on the Irish stew that the restaurant was serving for St. Paddy's day. The other thing I needed to get in was a green beer. Here's where I get on my soapbox and bitch about people's obsession with green beer on St. Patrick's day. IT'S FOOD COLORING!! Every year people drink some kind of garbage beer, like Bud Light or Miller Lite with green food coloring and want to say it's some kind of Irish tradition. Here's the problem... Real Irish beer is black or so dark that stupid green food coloring would do nothing to it. But, since green beer is synonymous with the day, I shot the green beer. To which I caught hell from Kevin, the cool bartender about ruining a perfectly good beer, I agreed and we both got a good laugh from it. While I was waiting for the food to get done, I made a few test shots of the beer trying to figure out how to show it green. I finally cam up with the idea to shoot the flash through the beer to light it up (again, something that could not be done with real Irish beer). Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now since a) I like the way the photo turned out and b) at least I got to use a decent beer — I used one of the local microbrews made at Cypress Street.