Twinkle twinkle

In case by some great mishap you didn't get to see my Christmas card this year (and if that's the case and you'd like to be on my mailing list you'd better let me know!), it was a great relief to me to share the decision-making as to "what to do" with fabulous food stylist Dagmar Vesely.
After playing around with various gingerbread stars ideas and arrangements this is my favourite. So Merry Christmas to you all!

A quick get-away

Grapefruit tree, Reale Alcazar, Seville
Earlier this month I finally stopped procrastinating and treated myself to a week's city-hopping in southern Spain. When I wasn't "researching the local cuisine" I had a terrific time wandering about with my treasured Sony. I still can hardly believe the quality it produces!
As you can see, I took some rain with me but, rain or sun, I would be hard put to choose between Seville, Cordoba and Granada - or their palaces! Here are a few pics of Seville for now....
Street, Seville
Nuns, Seville

Pool, Alcazar, Seville

Plaza de Espana, Seville
The Plaza de Espana is extensive. It not only looks like a film set - it is. When I was there they were filming a top-end Renault racing car which produced the most horrific noise echoing around the Plaza. You can hire a boat to go around the decorative canals of its semi-circular facade. But the Reale Alcazar and its gardens is Seville's most remarkable treasure. Water features significantly in the architecture and gardens of the area, not least in the Alcazar where they have a unique water clock which chimes profusely on the hour!

Decorative canal with ubiquitous Seville orange, Alcazar, Seville

Peacock, Alcazar. Just amused me.

There are some wonderful "proper" shops in Seville - hat shops, bathroom furniture, old-fashioned fabric shops and haberdashers and TWO traditional covered food markets. It would be easy to spend a day just window-shopping.

New representation and exhibition

I am pleased and excited to have signed up with Angela Woods Agency www.angelawoods.com
Only a week in and Angela has already been out showing my fresh portfolio full of loads of new work. You only need to ask!
Starting early next month an exhibition of work by all of Angela's photographers will be on show in the foyer at JWT - lovely big A1 prints. Wow. A great opportunity to make quite a few of you really hungry!

Beautiful Beck's

No, not the one with the pecs....
In total contrast to a somewhat challenging soup job I've just finished shooting (more on that another day...), I have been playing around with some slightly moody drinks tests and having great fun building little sets in the studio. Yes, the floor did get a bit slippery with wallpaper paste and yes I did have to drink some beer - in order to get the levels right of course. But it is the real thing!

McDonald's American Summer campaign

Even if we may not easily be able to get to France just now (!!!), the campaign I shot in the spring with the terrific TBWA\Paris team has now gone live. I only hope I manage to get over to see it!

Art Director - Maud Poilpre, Food styling - Anne-Claire Delphin

Web site update

I am going to be updating my web site over the next few days so please bear with me if it's a little erratic! If there's anything you especially want to see - DO EMAIL or RING me!
In the mean time here's a pink gooseberry pie you missed out on last week.

Come back soon and let me know what you think of the changes!

McDonald’s France are now showing the (healthy!) apples poster I shot for TBWA\Paris. It was a tricky one as we had to fit the segments into a layout which correlated exactly with the landscape of a laden Pink Lady apple tree shot on location by Andy Glass the previous week.

Lots of overlay traces were involved, not least to remember which segments were at the bottom and which on top.

But of course the real fun was getting them to stay put and get the lighting right while they all still looked fresh.


Happily another great team effort paid off, without too much resulting back ache!

Roasted red onions for One Eyeland

Really chuffed that my recent test shot (playing around with a lovely old Strobe strip light I've recently acquired) has been accepted by One Eyeland.

Chocomania

Krispy Kreme have been satisfying our sugar cravings with 2 shoots in the last 2 weeks. Although the last shoot was for their shakes, coffees and chillers, they brought along some of the Chocomania special edition douhgnuts which hadn't been filled when we shot them for the current campaign. Truly wicked....

Gnawing on Knorr's nosh

It's surprisingly seldom I get to photograph real home-style cooking which we then eat for lunch! But during our recent shoot for Knorr's Stock Pots the (large and very enthusiastic) team were all more than happy to dive in. Dagmar's roast chicken was particularly good.
The ideas are fun - nice to shoot meals part or fully eaten according to whether or not they used Knoor Stock Pots! Pity the recipes are not available on the UK's web site (which explains why they were able to use the "Taste the difference" slogan).

Client: Knoor, Agency: Edelman, Art Director: Jack Kent, Food stylist: Dagmar Vesely, Props: Jessica Georgiades

Working with the Artisan Baker

Earlier this year I had a real treat working on a book with Ori Hellerstein, Artisan Baker. Publisher Nick Eddison from Eddison Sadd Editions left me pretty much on my own with a regular exciting delivery of fresh bakery produce from Ori and a modest but adequate styling budget. With food like this who needs a mass of props! Just the right ones which Jo Harris sensitively sought- out for us.

We had fun with this shot. Ori remembers when he was a child buying bagels with twists of a pungent green spice called Za'atar (actually ground hyssop - a new one on me, exciting!) from a man with a donkey, so when we found this picture in the paper it simply had to be included (kitsch or not!!)
The icing on the cake (!) was two days shooting at the bakery near Stroud and watching the (very charming) Ori ply his craft - post to follow.
The book is due to be published in September. Watch this space!

A taste of summer - Edgerton Pink Gin cocktails

I don't photograph a lot of drinks so when Design Happy asked me to do a shoot for Edgerton Pink Gin and some summery cocktails made with it, it made a refreshing change - literally. The bottle was a tricky one, clear with the pink gin and white writing on the front but the cocktails were great fun to shoot. In order to represent the colour properly we used all real ingredients (OK the bubbly was a bit cheap but - hey...) and of course we felt duty-bound to sample the end-products. I am very happy to recommend it!

Preparing my Masterclass in Food Photography

Selecting images to illustrate the morning talk for my Masterclass at the London School of Photography on February 28th has been a major task! It's a very long time since I last gave a talk - 1999 at the Courtauld Institute, a short paper on advertising photography in Britain 1929-39 to co-incide with the Design Museum exhibition "Modern Britain 1929-39" (wearing my photo-historian's hat) - so it's a bit nerve-racking but it's been fun re-visiting old favourites. It seems like a good opportunity to share a few....

The interior was shot as a jacket for a historical cookbook called "Under the influence of Bright Sunbeams" by China de Burnay. I never quite forgave the publishers for flipping it, cropping it heavily and montaging an azalea over the top! The idea was that the picture spoke for itsself(...?) The picnic was shot at the top of Box Hill for Colin Spencer's "Cordon Vert". We lugged all the props manually to the highest point and shot on 5x4 sheet film, battling wind and wasps - but the sun shone!

Before moving to my London studio I used to shoot on location quite frequently. These images are from an M&S Calendar, "French Country Cooking" which we created in the environs of one of the food stylist's relatives' home in West Berkshire. No location fees but some serious training in how to handle geese. (NEVER turn your back on them!) A large sheet of plastic was a Godsend when it rained hard just as we'd set up in the poppy field and a few spare branches helped break up the harsh sunlight on the lemon cake. Good English weather. At least 120 film sufficed this time.
A few years on we had a phase of shooting things heavily filtered with coloured gels. The effects for this project for Thomson's Holidays were created entirely in camera, shot on 10x8 which used to terrify me - I couldn't even reach round from the back to the front of the camera to focus it, it was so enormous and I HATED loading the sheet film. Marie-Ange Lapierre did a brilliant job on the food styling. It is not easy to create transparent green-blue sorbet!