Edible Arts

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but how food looks actually affects our perception of how it tastes:
http://www.helium.com/items/1435535-how-sight-affects-the-way-food-tastes

Vertical flights of whimsical edibles & swirls of olfactory essences are used to create plates that are more than mere sustenance for of bodies. Food can be prepared and presented in ways that raise the qualify of a dish to the level of a work of art, but only in the culinary arts are these fleeting creations actually consumed.

The IACP (International Association of Culinary professionals) was in town and holding their annual convention a photography whose theme was “Edible Arts”. We created this series of images to illustrate the concept of ‘Edible Art’ and entered it into IACP’s photography competition where it won the ‘People’s Choice’ award!

Seafood Packaging

Beautiful seafood images for packaging and sales sheets involve more than meets the eye. It takes planning, precision and professionalism to create a clean, attractive image. First, a pre-production meeting is set with the client to establish goals. Then the perfect pieces of seafood have to be chosen, transported and handled carefully. Chris will develop a lighting and set strategy to showcase the product best. Next, a professional food stylist will trim and treat. Lights, camera, shoot! After the shoot, each image is retouched, retouched, and knocked out to create the perfect image for the client, as seen above.

Screen shots

It's the details that matter in photography. We only captured the screen image on this T-Mobile phone, but doing so well is quite difficult. Cell phone displays are almost always 'simulated' because cell phones screens work at a low resolution and have a slower 'refresh' rate and the image most cameras capture are so poor they can't be used in advertising. Using our special equipment & photographic techniques and we were able to capture this screen's actual image which was then used for both POS and billboard displays for T-Mobile's campaign.

Puyallup Fair animation project

As a follow-up to a previous post, this is the completed video spot created for the Puyallup Fair. We had a great time shooting the still images!

Talking Rain Water Splash

Capturing water drops is a lot harder than you'd think... Most high power studio flash systems have a duration of between 1/500 and 1/5000th of a second. This simply isn't fast enough to "stop" water droplets that are flying through the air. In creating a series of "slash" images we rented special equipment and built a unique set to freeze the water in motion and capture the images of fruit splashing through cold crisp water.

Clear Ice Creation

With our "transparency" technique we use with our Talking Rain bottle images, we were asked to create a series of frozen fruit positioned perfectly within blocks of ice. Actually freezing individual pieces of fruit in ice was discussed, but we were able to create incredible images of beautiful cubes of ice with all the facets, internal reflections, interferences and unique clarity that makes ice "look" cold. We photographed over 100 images of ice cubes, water drops and puddles and used elements from each to create a new line of photo-illustrations for Talking Rain's new line of ICE soft drinks.

Transparent bottle Photoshop trick

One of the advantages to working with digital images are the amazing effects you can create. But sometimes these effects are so subtle that they go overlooked. One example is an effect we've used extensive for Talking Rain and the images of their bottles. Most often these images are knocked out and placed on a myriad of backgrounds, but with a transparent neck or in the case with their water products, entirely clear bottles, a typical knock out would show only white behind the water or through the neck. The problem occurs when this image is placed on a gradient or colored background, it becomes obvious the shots were stripped in. We have developed a technique for making plastic or glass "transparent" thus allowing them to be placed on any background and look as if they were shot on that gradient or color.