7-time James Beard Award Winner, COOKBOOK WRITER, COOKING TEACHER, FOOD PHOTOGRAPHER
by James Peterson Whether poached or grilled, smoked or sauteed, salmon is as versatile as it is elegant. In Simply Salmon, best-selling cookbook author and acclaimed teacher James Peterson offers 65 irresistible recipes for everyone’s favorite fish. Using the informative photos and detailed instructions that…
Even though a food stylist’s role is to make the food look good for the camera, in a real life shoot setting, the food stylist, prop stylist and photographer are all interacting to make the photograph work. Because of this, it is helpful to notice…
The word strobe is just another way of saying “flash” but seems to be the term preferred by professional photographers. In any case, when dealing with strobe we’re manipulating very short bursts of light. The light is very intense and can expose film or a…
Hot Lights Just a jazzy term for what are basically the same lights we use (or used to use) at home. Because hot lights have tungsten filaments, they are commonly referred to as tungsten lights or just “tungsten”. The advantage to hot lights is that…
Even though it’s a fairly simple concept, the notion of contrast is sometimes hard for people to grasp. Photographers are always talking about contrast or about an image being “contrasty.” What does this mean? Contrast is the difference in the amount of light coming off…
In the 16th century, it was noticed that if one placed a small hole to one end of a darkened room, an image would be projected, from the outside, onto the wall opposite the hole. Imagine it this way. You have a room, 10 feet…
1) Don’t use your on-camera flash. Because the light comes from the same direction as the camera, it creates harsh shadows and highlights as well as ugly, small and pointy, specular high lights. Also, because light “falls off” rapidly as the distance of the light…
Hard light casts dark shadows with sharp edges while soft light, if extreme, can eliminate the shadows entirely. Hardness and softness of light are determined by the size of the light source and its distance from what it is you’re photographing. So, the sun is…
Recently I was asked to enter a picture in a photo contest for the International Association of Cooking Professionals who are holding their annual conference in Portland Oregon this year. I decided to enter a picture I took almost by accident when we were shooting…
by James Peterson 600 Recipes, 1500 Photographs, One Kitchen Education After two decades of teaching the fundamentals of home cooking, award-winning author James Peterson has distilled a career’s worth of knowledge into one master class: Cooking. Through more than 600 recipes illustrated by 1500 instructional…