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Posts tagged as:
photography
Love the photography of Melbourne-based food and travel photographer Bonnie Savage. You’ll know her work from Australian Gourmet Traveller and the SMH’s Good Weekend. I just adore it, all peaceful and moody at once, with lovely non-garish pops of colour. Look at the drinks pic below for heaven’s sake. Bonnie did a string of photos of a milkbar, where she followed the dear apron-clad owner around and took snaps of her feet up a ladder and peeking between jars of things. Check out Bonnie’s site to see them. Nothing is too polished in this photographic world of Bonnie Savage’s, but it’s all magically gilded and sparkles with real life.
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Is that the time? For heavens sake the weeks and days and, yes, months have flown by. Japan, the sprawling city of explorable gastronomic nooks, was of course amazing, and Christmas too. Oh dear. Back on track and planted at my desk, I’ll start posting on the various skiing, food and travelling adventures. Meanwhile, thank you so much to blogger extraordinaries Jeroxie and Simon Food Favourites and Noodlies and Food, Booze and Shoes for their time and energy last weekend while I rambled about various food tips and made us lunch. We went along to the new Concrete Blonde in Kings Cross, where my healthy lunch was totally upstaged by a whole roasting lamb on the spit, and chatted about food styling and photography. I made three simple dishes – a tuna nicoise crostini, a beetroot and broad bean salad and mussels in a cream and speck sauce – and then we shot them. Me being an ambassador for Philadelphia, the gist of the day was to include the Cream for Cooking and cream cheese products into the day. I mainly just loved hanging out with the bloggers, using the incredible kitchen at Concrete Blonde, and sharing cooking and photography tips between some very clever people.
Jeroxie took a little video of me picking through a bunch of beetroot in search of some decent soft little leaves to add to our salad.
And this is Noodlies’, or Thang Ngo’s, much longer video of me making the mussels. Thanks for posting you two! I realise now why you were holding your phones and cameras so still – those pesky video cameras! I hope it makes sense, and hope it didn’t feel quite so rambly on the day.
Meanwhile, I’ll post the recipe for the mussels here post haste!
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Just love the light, airy, nordic style of photographer Ditte Isager, who hails from Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspiration comes from the Dutch Masters, storytelling, and the effects from motion pictures. The photographer shows that overhead food photography can be completely wonderful, and the use of soft linens and minimalist style is rich with texture.
I found the wonderful Ditte Isager via my friend, photographer Kristin Hove, whose Norway-based blog is a constant inspiration.
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Just love this photo documentary by Jennifer Causey, who’s The Makers project involves photographing people who make things. She says of her undertaking “I soon realised I was also photographing people who make things happen”. As the project evolves, so does the adventure and pleasure of documenting the people behind the products, she says: to learn what inspires them, what keeps them going, and their thoughts on the city where they live and work. She features a food stylist, a potter, a mixologist (pictured here), a perfumer, and others. A totally inspiring, gorgeous little project from a clever photographer devoted to people and their crafts.
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Oh spare us the unrelenting, delicious cool. This gorgeous line of vintage products is designed for the rugged, yet sophisticated gentleman. “If Steve McQueen carried a beat-up leather duffle bag on the back of his motorcycle; what would be in it and how would the products look?” Well, like this.
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Incredible installation at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane. Real finches flock in a hanging knotted scramble of metal coat hangers. The exhibition, 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, opens tomorrow and lasts until 26th April next year.
The ambitious exhibition will occupy the entire Gallery of Modern Art and focus exclusively on works created between 2000 and 2010. It will showcase more than 200 works and feature over 140 artists and artist collaborative groups – senior, mid-career and emerging – from more than 40 countries.
Recent acquisitions being unveiled for the first time include a work in neon by Tracey Emin (England), sculptures and photographs by Romuald Hazoumè (Benin), playful sculptures of camp dogs by Arukun artists including Arthur Pambegan Jr and Craig Koomeeta (Australia), powerful photographs by Mitra Tabrizian (Iran), Guy Tillim (South Africa) and Olaf Breuning (Switzerland), a suite of drawings by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), and striking video works by SUPERFLE X (Denmark) and Sharif Waked (Palestine). See the website and new blog here.
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Carl Kleiner’s amazing photographs of ingredients before they get turned into biscuits, dough, cakes… Styling by Evelina Bratell.
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There is this excellent invention our New Zealand counterparts call The Bach, pronounced The Batch. It’s a small little dinky thing that you traipse to for weekends from Auckland and Wellington and wherever else you live. But then your Bach is your showpiece, as well. City-dwellers take great pride in the Bach, and it’s often more attractive, cleaner, more creative, just better, than the actual city home. But another thing about the Bach (and in this way it’s not like Australians’ “weekender”), is that they often start out small, and then are built on and extended, and attached to, so in the end it’s a sprawling thing made up of all these parts and rooms. This is the quirk of the Bach.
The Boatshed, a luxury boutique hotel on Waiheke Island just 40 minutes boat ride from Auckland (we saw whales on the way back!), is the best possible version of the Bach. The white-painted, wood-panelled abode, on the top of a hill overlooking Oneroa Beach and the world, started out as a family holiday cottage of designer David Scott. It’s now run by his son Jonathan, whose immaculate taste has turned a cottage into a showpiece, a bach into a luxurious and unique hotel.
In true bach style, The Boatshed has been added to and built on, so there are now a series of little boatshed rooms looking out to sea, an attached two-storey lighthouse that has its own dumb waiter so guests don’t have to bother coming down if they don’t want to, and a main cottage.
All rooms are different, but all maintain a sort of beachy boaty holiday moodiness. The interiors are light and sun-drenched, with polished concrete floors inside and sprawling decks outside. At night dozens of candles are lit, and a communal dining area sparkles as Jonathan, always the host, brings five-course meals and matching local wines to the table.
A house icecream is made from fresh chopped mint from The Boatshed’s own garden (another post, soon), and the Asian chicken ball starter is fresh and fragrant, with a lemongrass hint and water chestnut crunchiness. Breakfasts are made to order, including a perfect Hollandaise sauce with poached eggs and herbs from the garden, and includes local fruit toast, muesli and yoghurt to prepare guests for an active day ahead, if they choose to leave the hotel.
Borrow some bikes from The Boatshed and power up and down the roller coaster hills of Waiheke. Cycling on Waiheke turns the adage that what goes up must come down on its head. Instead, what goes downhill must soon go back up, and the minute you feel the wind in your hair as you whooooop downhill, there is going to be some wheerr-err-ahh-ooowwws when you have to climb the next hill. But getting to the top is always worth it. Pain, gain.
Coffee at Spice and lunch at Stoneyridge Vineyard. Mudbrick Vineyard and Restaurant offers possibly the island’s best dining outside The Boatshed itself. Oneroa village’s Waiheke Fruit and Veg sells organic beers and local wine, artisan bread, local cheese and Italian hams.
For more on The Boatshed, click here.
All photographs by Kate Gibbs (using a Helga camera).
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One fashion and food enthusiast is bringing the drama into photography. Luxirare writes about Macarons and Scorpions, edible Crayons and turquoise blue parfait, even Egg Nog. But it’s the photography that leaves us spinning.
Her post on Sushi Handrolls is awesome. Sure the use of dry ice may be a bit over the top, but too often do I serve my quail egg topped salmon egg rolls just straight on a plate. Now I’ll think twice about that.
Want Apple Napoleon to actually incite awe and a drumroll as if Napoleon himself were about to march? Well then check out these pictures. Think nobody could ever make girlscout cookies interesting? Well you’re downright wrong. I’ve never seen food photography like this. And nor, I’d wager, have you.
The “Manifesto” explaining what Luxirare actually does is bordering on confusing. You really need to concentrate. Talking about using the internet and blogging for their purposes, Luxirare says “The power of the internet to swallow so much into obsolescence is usually considered detrimental. The point here is to use the greatest invention of the 20th century, the internet and the obsolescence associated with it, as an advantage.”
In explaining the cuisine and fashion link, the blogger says:
“The Luxury and Rarity lenses zero in on the parallel worlds of clothes and cuisine. The pattern of consumption concerning the two are parallel, both operating on a devotion to hedonism, both running on the constant reinvention or update of current trends. Both require intimacy; food is consumed by the mouth and clothing must touch the body. The pattern of creation concerning both fields are distinctly similar; both require strong cutting techniques which eventually lead to new creations. Luxirare is committed to bring together these elements that inform both fields through a singular vision.”
This reminds me of the beginning of Heston Blumenthal’s opening sequence to In Search of Perfection. Dry ice, drama, a bit of a sense of humour. And completely beautiful shots in which food is no longer just something we eat, it’s the creation of beauty, in which food, art and even chemistry is truly intertwined. This is no piling stacks of eggplant, mozzarella and tomato on a plate and calling it art. Too often a drizzling of some fluorescent oil on a plate, sprinkled with cubes of some savoury jelly, is not particularly appealing. This photography conjures the urge of eating, playing with food’s natural beauty. The question remains, though, do you actually want to eat it? Hell yes.
Seen food photography that inspires you to cook (or paint!), let me know!
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