I Love My Job :)

If you've talked with me in person about my job I'm sure you've found out I really enjoy what I do. I work in marketing, helping with all the marketing for a particular fine dining chain. One of the parts of my job I really enjoy is when we have photo shoots. I thought I'd be fun to give you a little peek behind the curtain so to speak.

Our photo shoots always have a couple of our top chefs, some flown in from out of town, to make the food. Yes, that's right, it is real food made by one of the actual restaurant chefs. Here is what the kitchen looks like in the studio:

It's pretty big and basically has all the tools a chef could ever need to prepare a dish. When I tell people about work, a lot of friends are surprised to hear we use real food. They've seen stuff on TV about how McDonald's and other chains uses all these fake elements when taking pictures. The reality is that high end restaurants don't use fake ingredients for the most part. Our food looks good, there is no reason to fake it. Now, I will say that there are a few ingredients that you can't photograph easily; like ice cream or butter sauce. Ice cream melts so we use mashed potatoes. Butter sauce dries and gets that weird film on it, so we use cream of chicken soup (we also use that because the camera picks up the yellow better - real butter photographs clear). Now, just because our stuff is real doesn't mean we don't put it together extremely carefully. Lets say we want to shoot a dish with meat. We're going to prepare 4 or 5 cuts of meat and then figure out which one looks best. You also don't just plop it onto the plate. A food stylist plates the food in a way that makes sense for the shoot. For example, we were taking really close up pictures, so everything had to be kind of pushed together to the middle of the plate or it would be cut off. Once it is all plated and in front of the camera the photographer starts taking a shoot and then looking at it on the screen. See below how there is a monitor to the right...

Once everyone can see what it looks like we start making adjustments. "Move that green bean a quarter of a turn to the right" or "That plate has a couple too many peas". We're talking VERY specific about each tiny part of the food. The food stylist (woman in black) makes the tiny changes and the chef (white coat) watches to make sure the end result still looks like what the food will look like in the restaurant. You never want the food to end up completely different than what a guest will receive, guests tend to hate that. The pictures are then put in post production to make any adjustments necessary before the client (my company) gets them. And we're not talking major Photoshop editing here, just things like pumping up the red in strawberries. We were taking pictures of the dishes to be served in two months. Well, in two months we'll be able to get ripe strawberries, but right now it's not so easy. We cut up a couple pounds looking for some that were ripe. The ones we used in the end were ok, but they'll need just a little bit of help to look like ripe strawberries.

Well, I hope you found that interesting! I love this stuff. :)