One of the nicest things about working in a collaborative environment like Polara Studio is how we often “feed” off each others creativity for ideas, images and inspiration.
Jeremy, one of our photographers, spent a weekend hunting for something that Oregon is rightfully famous for, mushrooms. He didn’t have much luck as these wonderfully tasty little gems take part science and part arcane magic to find. Nevertheless he was determined to eat some mushrooms so went off to the local Farmers Market and bought two big bags of morels.
That afternoon at Polara, he showed the studio those two big bags, smelling wonderfully of green and earth that he planned to have for dinner. Our food photographer at Polara, Michael Shay, asked Jeremy if he could hold off on dinner while Michael did something with them. He took them up to the natural light studio with an old piece of metal and a bottle of olive oil, which we had around, and just started “following” the light. That’s how this first photograph was made. For the photo geeks reading this he’s shooting with a Nikon D3X and a 85mm tilt/shift lens. This is a great combo that allows spontaneity at the highest image quality while giving control for both depth of field and focus plane. God did most of the lighting (and does a great job BTW) with a little assist from a white card and a shaving mirror.
In the meantime, Jeremy looked up a recipe on how he was going to prepare his prizes. One peek at that gave Michael an idea for a neat image pair, showing this yummy food raw and ready to eat. An old cast iron frying pan and a little of the same lighting and this second photograph was created (with a little help from Chef Jeremy).
The only sad part is that many of his mushrooms didn’t make it home as the studio promptly ate them after shooting. The morels, sautéed with little onion and garlic, had a taste reminiscent of a nice steak, rich and beefy. It is always fun to see how, with a little creative collaboration and some cool food photography, the bounty of Oregon can make those little things in life both look and taste a bit better.
PS Check out our first food video “Messing Around With Morels”