The Mind Boggling Micro World of Food Styling

Yesterday I styled nut clusters for a packaging shot. It was one of those shoots where I was required to work on something very small and very detailed for a very long time. Detail work is great for me since I am able to get into the "zone" pretty easily and can concentrate for hours on end in one small area. The clusters were 1 inch cubes. They were made up of almonds and cranberries and sugar syrup as a binder. Then, they were dipped in white chocolate. My job was to cut one open and make each half  look "perfect". And not just perfect as in looking at it sitting on set. Perfect with each nut enlarged bigger than the size of the computer monitor! 

Making something look perfect, in my opinion, is sometimes better left to machines, illustrators or God.....but I am always up for a challenge so I tried anyway.  After attempting to cut these open and find one that cut beautifully clean and showed the required 3-5 nuts and 1-2 cranberries I decided fate was not going to be the answer. It's something you really don't know unless you try it and see the outcome. Everything was crumbling, chocolate was dragging, cranberry color was running into the chocolate, nuts were not nicely dispersed, etc.......Plan B.  I decided to build the perfect nut cluster with hot glue, clay and carefully chosen and individually cut nuts and cranberries. Yikes! Many hours later with dozens of trips back and forth to put it on set and under the "microscope" I was finished. The art director gave the thumbs up. They looked "close enough" like mirror images of each other to move on to dipping in chocolate. OK, so who knew that (red)clay would melt by the heat of the warmed white chocolate? Plan C. Drizzled the chocolate on the sides and back of the cluster so the entire cluster was not subject to the heat. And, it worked. Let that set in the frig for 5 minutes and it was ready for the next step.  I needed to shave off chocolate from the "cut" side of each cluster to make it look cut and not dipped. After another  hour or so of looking at the cluster on the computer monitor and adjusting cranberry goo or crumbs of white chocolate or microscopic pieces of fuzz that had found their way to my lovely cluster it was finally approved by the art director. 

Truthfully, it was a LONG 11 hour day. I spent about 6 hours straight on just one nut cluster. And I wondered to myself how many food stylists out there are not good at detail work and model building. Probably quite a few that have come into this job with food skills but not art skills.  This job portrays exactly what I mean when I tell people that I only care about how the food looks. And, I am not a chef........I am a food artist.

For Your Eyes Only.

When it comes to a photograph of food, all you have to work with is a 2 dimensional piece of paper with an image of food on it. You can't smell it. You can't taste it. You can't hear anything pertaining to what is going on around the food (think violins or noisy pizzeria or Grandma singing from the kitchen), You can't touch it. You can only see it from this one point of view. That means, all you have to convey a sense of place (including sounds) is this photo. All you have to tell the story of taste and smell and feel is this piece of paper or computer screen. That's it. But remember, a picture can tell a thousand words......so we are told.

Food styling to me is so expressive in really unspoken ways. Ways we may not think of when we grab that Italian food magazine off of the rack at Borders. But that photo of prosciutto on that table in that setting makes your mouth water. It reminds you of the smells at the Italian deli on the east side of town. And it takes you to that beautiful city of Parma where it is made. You feel a sense of the process it took to make it. You think of the sweet old guy who sells it from his store and gives free samples to the children in the neighborhood. Oh...and that taste...just like I remember last time I had prosciutto...that restaurant down on Buffalo street in the third ward. What a night that was. All from a photo.

People who sell magazines know that they are appealing to many senses when they make photos for their covers. They are hoping so anyway. Enough to get you to want to pick up that magazine or cookbook and look at it. Hopefully enough to buy the publication and read it recipe by recipe. Photos are powerful tools. We all know that. Everyday life tells us so. Think of the provocative images we see everyday via the Internet, newspaper or television. People are very effected by visual images. Advertisers know it, newspapers know it, food stylists know it, painters know it (to name just a few!).

A common link we humans share is the ability to look at something and interpret it with memories created by of all of our senses. Recalling a time, a place, a smell, a sound, a feeling, a taste. And we all interpret visual images differently depending on our experiences (or lack of) in life. That, my friend, is a beautiful thing indeed.  So when you look at photograph think about all the moments and memories it brings up for you. That is your life, your experiences, your uniqueness. 

Ahhh.......Living the Glamorous Life

I often run into people who think food styling must be such a glamorous and fun job to have. Their impression of advertising and editorial photography is somewhat different than reality. High pay, lots of creative and beautiful food, working in a photo studio with lights..camera...action...but the truth is that food styling is being able to with stand long hours on your feet with no breaks, take direction and listen to your clients (and everyone else on set who has an opinion) and to be able to set your needs aside for someone else's vision. And, to do all this with a smile and a "how can I help you achieve your desired outcome?" attitude. Glamorous? Hmmm.....you decide.

Often times my job is to make premade food  like french fries or pieces of frozen pie or frozen veggies look nice. This is usually more a job of sorting through hundreds of pieces of the food to find the prettiest ones and making them look delicious. It takes hours. It is more like detective work than food "styling" . Or, I may be asked to turn meatloaf into a beautiful carriage (or was that a pumpkin?) or to beautify chipped beef on toast so that it doesn't make you gag when you look at the photo.  I even styled garbage once for In-Sinkerator. It's magician's work I tell you! 

My last several jobs consisted of making a Halloween themed haunted castle cake that included flying bats and ghosts. The tomb stone read: Real E. Dead.........

Another job was for a fried food manufacturer. Lovely triangles of deep fried mac and cheese and oozing mozzarella sticks. And one this week will be for a slow cooker cookbook. Slow cooked lasagna. Do I have a fighting chance of making that look good? You bet I do!

I often kid my friends and coworkers about my glamorous life. I tell them that my chauffeur drove me to work and that I am a practicing woman of leisure. I sleep in till 7:00 and drink only organic cappuccinos on the way to work. They all know, however, that I start my days at 5:00 a.m. and often work 12 hour days and 70 hour weeks and juggle a group of 6 contract assistants, shoppers and food preppers. I haven't had many weekends off in the last several years either. I do billing at night (or before work), work on last minute details of the next job, put my ducks in a row, and put out all incoming fires as they are cast upon me.  I do a lot of schlepping of equipment and food (up and down stairs in the morning and into my car...in and out of studios...and back home again). That is my life as a food stylist. And, I love it.....

The Zen of Food Styling

I find food styling very meditative. When I can completely become absorbed in the task at hand I often get lost.........in the mini micro world of crumbs and grains of rice and smudges on a plate or tiny bubbles in a glass. It's a wonderful place to be lost in. As long as you find your way out before there are art directors and photographers yanking you off set and back into reality.

Sometimes the world of food arranging is a secret world. You (and only you) know when you look at the computer screen with a likeness of your food on it that in order to move the green pea underneath the diced carrot on top of the broccoli you must move that piece of bacon that is anchoring everything together. It becomes.....well....gulp....a challenge.....to say the least. And it is no use trying to explain it to your client. They want it moved 1/16th of an inch or the photo is a failure. So, you move it. After you've moved the bacon (by cutting off just the tip) and propped up the broccoli with another pea and turned the carrot ever so slightly so it better supports the green pea that had to be moved 1/16th of an inch. Whew! It's done though....and everyone is happy. Just one more swash of canola oil and we are ready to shoot.

There are other days when the zen of food styling is not so zen. Someone has shaken me out of the "zone" and made me change something that when changed had an effect on the entire plate and now is not balanced right (visually or physically). This happens sometimes when someone wants to try "something" just to see what it looks like. They don't realize at the time that upsetting the balance of everything like that will cause a chain reaction that leads me out of the zen zone into the off balance zone. 

Then the mood changes and the plate changes and the karma changes and things start to go wrong. Call me crazy but those of us in the business know what I mean. There is an optimal shooting time. An unidentifiable window of opportunity. Once you go past this window everything starts to unravel. The food is no longer at it's optimal freshness. Parts start to droop ever so slightly. The food shifts like it's been through a earth quake that only ants could feel. The spontaneity is gone. The food stops cooperating. It starts to unravel. There is very little time left before it is completely gone. You sense this. There is no getting back to where you were 10 minutes ago. The moment is lost. And you don't want to mention this to those around you. You know instinctively when the food is ready. When that best moment is. And sometimes you know when it has passed. Mostly, you will know and others will not. It is so slight sometimes...but you know when the zen is gone. And you know that if you don't hurry up and shoot it will mean starting over. Which is o.k. too. After all I say "that's what I am here for. To make pretty food."

For the love of a stand in.

It happens all the time. Too often. In fact I can feel it coming almost before I put the stand in food on set. The beloved stand in, that is. The stand in food that everyone falls in love with so much that no other will ever do. No other will ever be good enough. All others fail in comparison.....if only the hero could be as lovely as the stand in (holding back tears)......I miss the way it....looked all sweet and perfect...how the garnish was so expressive...how it made me feel.........(yikes!).

I had a photo shoot a month or so ago that went this way. I put the beautiful stand in crown roast on set so the photographer could do his lighting and the set stylist could work with the surrounding props. The roast looked so pretty. Sitting there so regally. Such a nice shape, color and size. It was a beauty. And of course, before I began,  I labored over which of the four crown roasts I bought would be the one that I cooked for stand in. Which one was the ugliest? The homeliest? The least likely to win the beauty pageant? It's a hard decision with raw meat since you really are anticipating how they will cook. Will the heat destroy the beautiful shape it starts out with? Will something lurking beneath the skin become evident in an unfixable way once it goes into the oven? What about the bones? Do they lean to left or the right? Which way is preferable in the final usage of the photo? So many things running through my mind when I pick "the least likely to succeed".

So, I decide on one. I am fairly confident that I have chosen the right one.  It was a little lopsided. A little too much fat. the bones didn't look evenly spaced. Surely, not the winner. And, if I am proven wrong, I am sure one of the other three will be at least as beautiful as this one.

So, little did I know that while I was furiously working on 3 more crown roasts in 2 different ovens, the set stylist, the photographer and the art director were all falling in love. In fact, I doubt they knew it at the time. Sometimes there is no warning. Until the ugly hero shows up and they miss their old pal. Usually I pick up on this while everyone is talking about the photo. We like this....we hate this....please make the hero look more like that...why does the patty pan squash look like a possum? I am not kidding. I have heard it all. And I am trained to listen. Very Very important. Not only do I have to listen to what they like and don't like, I need to anticipate what they really want by what they are not saying. Or by what they can't quite put into words. In fact, it's a little like the saying "I don't know what I like but I will know when I see it".

Sometimes it's easy. "Make the hero more juicy looking". Ok, easy enough, shine..moisture.....drips. Other times it is not so easy. "It looks depressing". "I want happy". Then I must think realllllllllllllllly hard. They think it is too dark, too many dark colors. They may think the lighting is too contrasty or dim. They want bright and sunny. Or they need a more spring-like garnish like radishes or asparagus. Or happy colors like yellow and orange. I need to listen. And then try various things and see how they react. I must try things until I hear them say "ahhhhhhh....yes!". Until they like what they see. Simple.

So, on the day we shot the crown roast I was not on set too much. I had a million things to do. So I wasn't witness to the love affair. Until.........I brought the "hero" to the table. Which apparently also became the uninvited guest. I was a little taken back by the sour reaction. But, I am not attached to my food so much that I can't accept that sometimes they want their first love and not what I have just put my heart and soul into for the last three hours.  Sometimes it happens...and I accept it. That is just the way it goes. And, after all, it is not about me.

So I go and find that stand in. If it's in the garbage already I just dive right in and find it. I have been in many garbage cans in the past to rescue everything from the perfect basil leaf to a full cooked chicken. I'll find it. And I will revive it. And I will make it just the way it was........so many hours ago. Like magic. Sometimes that is all I need....a little magic.....and patience and some vegetable oil.