Valentine's Day Food Shoot

Here are some quick and dirty photos that I shot to accompany a Food section front on Valentine's Day food recommendations. The Gazette's Food editor Cecelia Hanley shopped for the goodies and paginator/chef-in-training Theresa Olinger worked on the plating.

The above pic is just a flash of inspiration while I waited for Cecelia and Theresa to prepare the next dish. Sometimes a strong photo is the simplest to make. I like to give our designer Michelle options when it comes to layout. Well, as long as she doesn't plaster text all over my photos.

Mangoes and strawberries drizzled with chocolate syrup. Very tasty! That's part of the fun of working on a food shoot-tasting the "subjects" afterward. The mango was a little too wet to hang onto the syrup the way I had envisioned.

I try to keep my lighting simple. For this shot of a vanilla bean heart and chocolates was lit with one Speedotron strobe and a honeycomb snoot that was bounced onto a mylar sheet taped to a piece of foam core. I had a camera in one hand and the reflector in the other. I just kept angling the reflector until I got the effect on the heart and the right amount of fall-off on the candies.

Jim