My parents visited us last weekend! We started things off perfectly by enjoying some delicious pizza at Emma’s Thursday night. Then on Friday, I snuck out of work a bit early to check out the Chihuly exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts with them – amazing! I think my Dad put it best when he said he felt like we were in a world Dr. Seuss had created. After picking up Apolinaras, we headed out for Blue Ribbon BBQ, which the birthday boy requested, and then drove up to Vermont.

We started the next day by doing the Magic Hat Brewery tour and tasting, where I voted for Wacko, aka The Liquid Song of Summer, as my favorite. My mom was super cute and answered a question right on the tour to win a free pint glass.

Next up was lunch on Lake Champlain at Splash - we were literally on the lake since the tables are on a floating dock. The views were beautiful and our clam chowder was surprisingly excellent.

Then we indulged in a little ice cream during the Ben and Jerry’s Factory tour (which is free by the way if you check in on yelp) and my Dad and I squeezed in a hilly run before our Korean takeout from Yama. It was a very relaxing day and we headed to bed early since the next morning we needed to rise and shine super early for the highlight of our trip, a King Arthur Flour baking class!

I’ve been planning this trip with my mom ever since I took a class there last year with a group of bloggers. While the boys amused themselves by hiking the Appalachian Trail, my mom and I were treated to a tour of the King Arthur Flour warehouse, production facility where they make all their mixes, and test kitchen, led by the lovely Allison Furbish, who is their web media coordinator and set up our blogger baking class last year. Here we are in the test kitchen, where I salivated over their super well stocked walk-in pantry. Thanks so much Allison for coming in on a Sunday to show us around!

Then we headed in for our class called “The Magic of Wild Yeast – Sourdough” where we learned everything we need to know to successfully maintain starter cultures and bake beautiful boules of sourdough bread at home – SO fun! We also hit the King Arthur store, where I loaded up some fun baking goodies, and had a fantastic meal at Foundry on Elm after the drive home. I had such a great mini vacation with my family and wish they could visit more often!

Sourdough is my absolute favorite and I’ve been diligently feeding my starter and plan to make something with it soon! In the meantime, I wanted to whip up some sandwiches with the bread we baked during the class and decided to feature ripe summer tomatoes. I settled on chicken panini with a tomato and feta sauce topped with melted mozzarella and fresh tomato slices. I can’t wait to take a stab at making my own sourdough!

Triple Tomato Chicken Panini
Printable Recipe

Ingredients:
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 cup of your favorite tomato sauce
1/4 cup chopped sun dried tomatoes
4 slices sourdough bread
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 1/2 cooked butterflied boneless skinless chicken breasts, warmed
1 large tomato, sliced
2/3 cup shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese

Directions:
Place feta cheese and tomato sauce in a food processor and pulse until smooth, about 1 minute. Stir in sun dried tomatoes.

Use a pastry brush to evenly spread olive oil over each slice of bread. Flip slices of bread over and evenly spread with feta tomato sauce. Top two slices evenly with chicken, tomato slices, and mozzarella cheese. Top with the remaining slices of bread, tomato sauce side down. Place sandwiches in a preheated panini press and cook until bead is crispy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Makes 2 panini.

Nutrition: 503 calories, 24.0g fat, protein per panino
Cost: $2.60 per panino

Whew, things have been busy lately, but I finally have a little extra time to blog about two events that I’ve been meaning to share for awhile now. The first is a fabulous virtual bake sale, being hosted by my blogging buddies Jen and Cara, that will benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Being a cancer researcher myself, I understand the importance of raising money for studies, and I encourage you all to head over to the site and make a bid on one of the many mouth watering goodies from Wednesday, May 4 to Friday, May 6 next week. I’m donating a batch of my M&M Cashew Pretzel Bars and plan to bid on the Crusty White Bread with Rosemary and Sea Salt – yum!

I also wanted to tell you about a fantastic chocolate workshop I attended last month with Shannon. It’s run by Boston Chocolate Tours and focuses on tempering chocolate and making truffles. I received two complimentary tickets to the class, but I received no compensation for this post and all opinions are mine, of course!

Our instructor Dorian, who is a retired pastry chef, started by telling us about the history of chocolate while he whisked up some hot chocolate for us to enjoy (which was phenomenal by the way, I’ve made the real deal several times at home now using his suggested ratio of 2-3 ounces of chocolate for every 5 ounces of milk).

He then ran us through the science behind why it’s important to temper chocolate. Basically, chocolate is made up of several types of crystals, but you have to coax them to all be beta crystals in order for the chocolate to be organized perfectly so it snaps nicely when you break it and is nice and shiny. Tempering is essential when you’re dipping truffles in chocolate! He explained how tempering is all about time, motion, and temperature, and we learned how to use a double boiler to temper chocolate properly. You basically heat the chocolate to 110˚F, then cool it by adding additional chocolate (called the seed) to 85˚F, then slightly warm it back to 90˚F, all while stirring well the entire time. Then it’s ready to go!

We got a ton of helpful tips. He suggested getting a milk frothing thermometer because it’s in the range that is needed for tempering. He also suggested using a heating pad to keep the chocolate warm while you’re working with it after it’s been tempered. Also, I didn’t realize this before, but it’s really important to only use high quality chocolate with no added ingredients (which many brands of chocolate chips have) – only cocoa butter, cocoa liquor/paste (sometimes referred to as unsweetened chocolate), sugar, vanilla, and soy lecithin (an emulsifier) should be on the label.

Next, we learned how to make ganache, which was the center of all our truffles. We had four types of ganache to use – dark, milk, raspberry, and caramel – the caramel was my favorite. Then we rolled our ganache into truffles and decorated them. I dipped some in tempered chocolate and coated others with some of the toppings they had, including ground almonds, cocoa nibs, and toasted coconut. I ended up with a huge box of truffles to take home and Apolinaras and I savored each and every one – they were fabulous! If you’re ever visiting Boston, I highly recommend checking out this class or one of their tours. Tickets are $75 and you can register here. Thank you Boston Chocolate Tours for this fun foodie adventure!

You can imagine my response when the lovely Megan asked if I’d be interested in attending a blogger baking class she was organizing at King Arthur Flour. Yes, please! I have actually exclusively used King Arthur Flour for years now because it’s such a high quality product and always yields consistent results. In fact, I always have at least their all-purpose, white whole wheat, whole wheat, bread, and cake flours in my pantry at all times (yes, I stockpile flour similarly to the way I hoard baking chips – you never know when you’ll want to whip up a treat!). Even though I’m a pretty confident baker in general, I still haven’t completely mastered baking with yeast, so I was very excited to take a class at their Baking Education Center and learn from the pros!

So last weekend I headed out on a road trip to Norwich, Vermont with an awesome group of Boston bloggers. During the course of the day King Arthur Flour treated us to lunch, the baking class, and a huge goodie bag of whole grain baking essentials (but I received no compensation for this post and all opinions are mine, of course!). We were impressed as soon as we arrived and dug into sandwiches made with the most perfect crusty sourdough bread! As we learned more about the employee-owned company, what really struck me was how supportive and helpful they strive to be to home bakers. They have a very cool Baking Hotline where you can chat with them live online about baking issues for free and a recipe blog that I just started following. I was also very impressed by their educational programs.

After lunch we moved onto our class where we each made our own pizza dough, whole grain crackers, and brownies in a gorgeous light-filled classroom. Our instructor Susan was incredible. In addition to patiently answering all our questions and putting up with our flashing cameras, she walked around while we were making our dough and demonstrated how it should feel at each step. I learned so many tips! Did you know it’s best to fold your dough instead of punching it down and that you can’t over knead your dough if you’re doing it by hand? Or that whole wheat flour can go rancid in as little as 6 months due to the oil in the wheat germ? Or that you can make your dough and toss it in the freezer for later use? I’m already excited to try some more recipes with yeast. Maybe I’ll even get confident enough to enter their National Festival of Breads contest next year!

The classes are pretty reasonably priced at $90 and I’d highly recommend them to anyone in the area. I’ve been drooling over the course catalog and plan to take another one with my mom when she visits next year. Speaking of my mom, when I told their team about my mom’s culinary arts program, they offered to work on setting up a baking demo and/or send her some free baking ingredients, how cool is that?

Of course, I couldn’t resist buying some goodies at their company store too. I tried to restrain myself somewhat and just get products that are hard to find anywhere else. I got four types of flour (pumpernickel, whole wheat pastry, semolina, and toasted hazelnut), mini cinnamon chips, espresso powder, instant yeast, and colorful muffin cups. They also have an online store that I only suggest checking out if you’re ready to part with some cash…there are so many fun ingredients and tools that it’s hard to exert much self-control!

After our class, we had a delightful dinner that Alicia organized at Carpenter & Main and stayed overnight at a quaint bed and breakfast. Talk about a fun group – we all had a blast! Here we all are the next morning by the bed and breakfast (minus Bridget who unfortunately couldn’t stay overnight).

From left to right,
Front row: Kristen
Middle row: Katie, Elina, Megan, Meghan, Alicia, Michelle
Back row: Jen, me

Definitely check out their awesome blogs for more baking tips and pictures if you haven’t visited them yet! Our weekend was the perfect foodie adventure and SO much fun – thanks so much to King Arthur Flour and Megan for organizing! I already can’t wait to go back!

For example, I didn’t know that some frozen veggies (green peas, lima beans, and sweet corn!) are always a smart buy because they lose flavor and tenderness so rapidly after harvest that the flash frozen version is often higher quality than the fresh one. Another of McGee’s tips in the book is that searing meat doesn’t seal in its juices. Instead, it’s the way that you cook the meat that determines moistness. He’s has been trying to convince the public about this for years – how do I know this? Well, I heard it from the man himself!

Harvard had a seminar this week entitled Science and Cooking: A Dialogue, that Shannon and I managed to score tickets to attend. I chatted with McGee briefly after the event while he was signing my mom’s copy of On Food and Cooking, and he was so nice and assured me that the book would be even better than the summary sections they sent!

McGee’s talk was just the tip of the iceberg though – look who else was there!

Yes, that’s Ferran Adria on the right, the chef behind El Bulli, a Michelin 3-star restaurant on Spain’s Catalonian coast, which is considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world! He is the creative genius that founded avant-garde cooking (he seemed to prefer this term over “molecular gastronomy”), a culinary style in which chefs use scientific techniques to create the most gorgeous and intricate dishes with surprising elements of flavor, temperature, and texture.

Adria’s Catalan translator and friend Jose Andres, on the left, stressed that beyond being the first person to create foams and invent spherification (which they demoed!), that Adria has pushed the culinary world in an entirely new direction because he has never hesitated to share his techniques.

In fact, Adria is closing El Bulli next summer to open a center where chefs from around the world can come and study and create dishes without the pressure of having to serve diners every night. And get this, they will be posting what they create each day on the internet every night – incredible! Adria is also spearheading a course at Harvard this semester on science and cooking, which is why he was on campus. His philosophy that cooking, and life in general, is about curiosity and a willingness to learn was so inspiring! I’m so glad I was able to attend!

I’ve been meaning to tell you about the very cool Culinary Arts High School Program my mom runs at Central Campus in Des Moines, Iowa for awhile now, and I figured this would be the perfect opportunity since I won’t be cooking up any recipes to share while we’re on vacation!

This is the sixth year my mom has taught the program and I have to admit that I’m a little jealous of all the cooking experience her students get – they are truly ready to tackle culinary school or directly enter a restaurant upon graduation. In fact, students that complete both years of the program receive 33 college credits at the Des Moines Area Community College (and enter as sophomores if they choose to attend after graduation) and many of these credits transfer to other culinary schools as well.

Students commute from their high schools to attend Culinary 1 and 2 classes for 3 to 3 1/2 hours a day. During the first year they learn basic cooking skills and are servers at the Central Campus Café and during their second year they expand upon their basic skills and do all the cooking for the café, where the menu always includes two kinds of soup, side salads, several kinds of sandwiches, a daily special, and a few desserts. And the prices are right – a daily special of a grilled chicken breast, rice pilaf, green beans, a homemade roll, and your choice of a soup, salad or dessert is just $5.25! My very favorite thing on the menu is my mom’s chocolate cake, which is also my go-to chocolate cake recipe (and is shared below!). They serve 40 to 80 people a day and all the proceeds go back into the program – for ingredients or trips to competitions!

Yes, that’s right, the students also get to battle it out at Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) and Skills USA culinary competitions for scholarships! For FCCLA, a three person team has one hour to prepare a three course meal. My mom’s students rocked this year’s menu of corn chowder, Maxwell Street-Style pork chops with Roesti potatoes, and a lemon tart with Chantilly cream, became state champions, and will be attending nationals in July! At Skills USA individuals compete in the culinary arts, commercial baking, or food and beverage service categories. This year the students found out the menu at the competition and had three hours to whip up a Waldorf salad, beef stroganoff, and broccoli with Hollandaise sauce for culinary competition and dinner rolls, coffee cake, cream puffs, and a decorated cake for baking section. For the food and beverage service competition, students are given a menu and have to set up a table and serve food and beverages to the judges. My mom’s students placed in all of these categories this year and will be heading to nationals in June, where the winners get a full ride to the culinary school of their choice! As you can see, this is a really valuable program for those high school students that know they want to pursue a culinary career.

And of course I have to finish up by bragging a bit about my mom. She was recently selected as the Des Moines Rotary Teacher of the Year and received the National Restaurant Association’s ProStart Educator Excellence Award. And these accolades are very well deserved. She is always working with her students on the weekends and over the summer to make sure they all graduate and do well at competitions – her dedication is truly inspiring.

If you live in Iowa and would like to support her program, you can visit their café, which is open from 10:55am to 12:30pm most Wednesdays and Thursdays from October through May (the menu and directions to the school are posted here). And they are always looking for local chefs to mentor students for competitions, perform demonstrations, donate expensive ingredients, and provide internships.

And as promised, here’s my mom’s chocolate cake recipe that they serve at the cafe. I’ve been completely spoiled by this recipe and can’t order chocolate cake at restaurants anymore because I’m always disappointed – this version beats them all!

My Mom’s Chocolate Cake
Printable Recipe

Ingredients:

Chocolate Cake:
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1 tablespoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup cold coffee (use regular strength coffee and nothing too strong like Starbucks!)
2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 large egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Chocolate Frosting:
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup milk
6 cups powdered sugar
3/4 cup cocoa
6 ounces butter (12 tablespoons), at room temperature

Directions:

For the cake, heat oven to 350˚F. Grease two 9-inch round cakes and line with parchment paper. Sift flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, and salt together into the bowl of a mixer. Mix buttermilk, coffee, vegetable oil, egg, and vanilla extract in a medium bowl until well combined. Add liquids to dry ingredients and mix for 2 minutes. Scrape down bowl and mix again briefly. Add cake batter evenly to prepared pans and bake at 350˚F for 25 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool for 5 to 10 minutes and remove cakes from the pans. Remove parchment paper and cool completely. Cakes can be wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap and frozen in the freezer until needed, if desired.

For the frosting, add vanilla to the milk and set aside. Sift powdered sugar and cocoa together in a large bowl. Beat butter in a mixing bowl until fluffy. Gradually add 1 cup of the sugar/cocoa mixture to the butter, then part of the milk mixture, alternating until the ingredients are well mixed. If the frosting is too thick, add 1 teaspoon of milk at a time to thin it out, mixing well after each addition until desired consistency is reached.

To assemble the cake, spread 1/4 of the frosting on top of one cake layer. Place other cake layer on top and use remaining frosting to cover and decorate the cake.

p.s.  My mom has requested I skip the nutrition stats for this one and I agree!

Overall, I thought the judges were very fair and thoughtful with their candid feedback, and I’ve been keeping their comments in mind since the show filmed while developing new recipes. I was really blown out of the water was when Chef Micheal Psilakis tasted my brownies said “I would not stop eating this until I was sick.” Talk about a surreal moment! Actually, the whole experience was pretty surreal and I tried to take as many pictures as possible throughout the process, so I could share a behind the scenes look of the competition with all of you. I hope you enjoy my little recap!

Two weeks after I found out I was selected to be on the show, while I was in the middle of adapting my recipes so they could be completed under the competition time constraints and furiously testing every brand of chocolate Whole Foods carried to see which would be best in my brownies, a crew consisting of a producer, cameraman, and audio engineer from High Noon Entertainment visited me in Boston to shoot some footage. The 30 seconds you saw of my lab and kitchen took all day to film! Not only did I get to rock my lab goggles (hahaha), I actually had a great time showing them around the lab and chatting about the filming process.

My first big challenge actually began about two weeks before I headed to NYC, and it involved the plantains…. The trick is that they have to have a black-brown peel to be sweet and soft enough for the recipe. Unripe or fermenting plantains = recipe fail, and since it’s difficult to predict when they will be just ripe enough, my strategy was to buy plantains every other day for the 2 weeks before the competition in hopes that 3 of the 30, yes 30, that I brought with me to NYC would be ripe enough. Here they are on my hotel desk in case you think I was joking about stuffing a carry-on bag full of my precious ripening plantains with me. The security guards must have thought I was crazy!

After safely depositing my plantains at the hotel, my next order of business was visiting the Food Network offices and studios at Chelsea Market! We met our competitors and went over the details of the show. Then I got to visit the test kitchens and make sure all my ingredients and supplies were in order. Just being in the Food Network kitchens made my heart flutter.

I attempted to calm my nerves and headed to bed early since our call time was an 8 am the next day. The cameras started filming as soon as we arrived. We put our stuff in the green room, which was filled with tasty snacks, and then put on our Food Network aprons with our names – yay! We actually got two and I smile each time I put one on to cook dinner every night.

Then we entered the studio – the same studio where Iron Chef America is filmed, and the studio slowly started filling up with the film crew. There were about 60 crew members, and when I saw all the people, reality set in about what was about to happen. I was surprised about how nervous I got, but I couldn’t help it because it was such a big production! Before I knew it, Guy Fieri was filming the intro of the show and we were off and baking!

I’m not going to give a recap of what happened when I was baking since you already saw that part, but I did want to share that my favorite part of the show was when I was waiting for the ganache on my brownies to set. I actually took some time to just look around and take everything in and reflect on what an incredible experience I was having.

When it was all over, I managed to find Guy. I was a bit star struck interacting with him the whole time since Apolinaras and I are huge Triple D fans, but he was exactly how he is on the show in real life – super nice and funny, and he really did his best to put everyone at ease. He also gave me a big hug when it was all over and told me I did a good job – awww.

Overall, it was an amazing experience and one I will never forget. I highly encourage anyone thinking about submitting a recipe for next season to do so. You are all so creative and I would love to see a fellow blogger on the show!

Remember, when I just happened to meet Emily (whose Comfort Foods show aired a few weeks ago!) at Chelsea Market, home of the Food Network? And when I said edible cookie dough was on my mind a lot lately? And when I said I was encouraged to come up with an original cake recipe? Yep, all related to the show! I’m so glad the cat is finally out of the bag because I can’t wait to share everything about this amazing experience with you! I still can’t believe I’m going to be on Food Network – the Food Network, which I watch all the time!

My episode airs Sunday, April 11 at 9pm EST/ 8pm CST! Will my caramelized plantain cupcakes or peanut butter cookie dough brownies bring home the $25K?!? You’ll just have to tune in to find out. I’m so excited to watch and will be posting a recap with a bunch of pictures and a behind the scenes account of the show after it airs, so stay tuned for that as well. You can also check out a video interview by The Boston Foodie about the show here – thanks Will!

One night, a few months ago, while I was attempting to edit a particularly blah set of photos, I thought to myself – I really wish I had professional help. Oh a whim, I googled “Boston food photography” and was immediately blown away by the mouth-watering photos on professional food photographer Gary Tardiff’s website. Before I lost my nerve, I quickly sent him an email asking if he would be willing to give a group of local food bloggers some tips. Now I really wasn’t expecting to hear anything back, so you can imagine how excited I was when Gary said he would love to have us all visit his studio!

So instead of posting a recipe today, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes look at a professional food photographer in action and share some of the wonderful tips he gave us! Spending the afternoon with Gary was absolutely amazing! He spent over 3 hours demonstrating how he takes such gorgeous pictures and answering all our questions!

Gary has been a professional food photographer for 32 years and mainly does advertising work for companies and restaurants, like Chili’s, Dunkin Donuts, Kraft, and Pillsbury, to name a few. 95% of his photos are taken in his studio in Southie, which has a kitchen stocked with every type of food prop you can imagine (we were all insanely jealous of his wall of colorful plates). He stressed that 99% of the food he photographs is real and prepared just the way it would be at home.

Here are some of my favorite tips:

Understand and use the exposure triangle – ISO, shutter speed, and aperture – to your advantage. Exposure is the amount of light that reaches the camera’s sensor. I already had a basic understanding of this concept but really loved his analogy of thinking about it because it can get confusing! He said to imagine a perfect exposure as a half full glass of water (with underexposure being less than half full and overexposure being entirely full). Shutter speed is how quickly the water from the faucet above the glass is turned on and off. Aperture is the size of the stream of water (how far the faucet is opened, with a large aperture being a larger stream of water). The size of the glass is ISO (how much water is needed to half fill the cup, which is how sensitive the camera sensor is to light).

There are many ways to get the glass half full and all three parameters relate to one another. With food photography, you should have a nice light source and can usually use a low sensitivity ISO of 100 or 200 (the lower the ISO the less noise you have, but the higher the number the more sensitive the sensor is to light, so in a low light situation (e.g it’s cloudy out) you may need a high ISO and have to deal with slightly more grainy photos), so you mostly have to worry about the aperture and shutter speed relationship. Aperture changes the depth of field, so you may want to pick the aperture first and then adjust the shutter speed as needed to get the correct exposure. For example, if you decide to use a small aperture to get a large depth of field (so an entire plate of cupcakes is sharp) then the shutter speed will need to be longer – the faucet is a small stream of water so it must be left on for a longer period of time. If you decide to use a large aperture to get a shallow depth of field (one cupcake is sharp and the rest are blurred in the background), then the shutter speed will need to be shorter – the faucet is a large stream so you need to shut it off quickly. In general, in food photography, we’re not worried about capturing motion and mostly concerned about depth of field, but if, for example, you want a quick shutter speed to freeze the motion of a drizzle of caramel about to hit a cupcake, you can select your shutter speed first and then adjust the aperture as needed to retain the correct exposure.

Along these lines, play with the depth of field. Your DSLR standard kit lens may not be the best for food photography because the aperture range is limited. With a large aperture, only the part of the picture you are focusing on is sharp and the rest is blurred (e.g. f/1.4 – as a side note, f stops are like fractions so just like 1/2 is bigger than 1/4, f/1.4 is larger than f/10) so you have a shallow depth of field. With a smaller aperture (e.g. f/10), more of the image becomes sharp and you get a larger depth of field. For example, on my standard 18-55mm Canon zoom lens, the maximum aperture is only f/5.6 at 55mm. If you invest in a prime 55mm lens (a stable lens that does not zoom), you can get a f/1.4 or f/1.8. I just added one of these to my wishlist! While it’s nice to eventually learn how to manually focus your camera (selecting ISO, aperture, and shutter speed on your own), many cameras have semi-automatic settings you can use where you pick your aperture, for example, and then the camera selects the correct ISO and shutter speed for you. This is a great starting point. Also, Gary actually never uses a macro lens, so you can certainly get great shots with just the prime!

Use a tripod. First, it slows you down, so instead of quickly snapping a shot it makes you think more about what you want to feature in the photo. Second, it prevents blurry photos when you’re using a long shutter speed.

Always adjust the white balance directly on your camera before taking your shots. Basically, you take a picture of something white and then tell the camera that’s what white is (your camera manual should have specifics on how to do this!). This is important because different types of light have different hues (e.g. tungsten incandescent bulbs cast a yellow hue). Gary does use Photoshop, where you can adjust white balance with a raw image, but prefers to get the image as close to perfect as possible when he’s taking it. Also, always shoot in raw format and then make adjustments. Shooting in JPEG already compresses your image and colors are lost!

Set up a lighting studio that mimics natural light and play with the lighting until you’re satisfied with the image. This is fun and doesn’t have to be expensive! Here’s what Gary set up:

He always backlights the food. In this case, the light on the left side of the photo is being softened (this reduces the number of harsh shadows) by the screen in front of it. He uses vellum paper (which can be bought at art supply stores) mounted on a wooden frame for the screens. He also uses different sized mirrors and white particle board to reflect light where needed.  I really enjoyed watching him in action playing with the light and I’m now dreaming of turning our extra bedroom into a lighting studio!

Take the time to learn how to set the focus points on your camera instead of using autofocus. Your camera doesn’t know what you want to focus on!

And finally, have fun with different props and colored plates.  When shooting Adrienne’s loaf of bread, Gary placed the loaf on a small wooden cutting board and then placed a bread knife and napkin in front of it.  In less than 30 seconds his picture immediately looked better than any of mine!  I definitely want to improve in this area.

I hope these tips have been helpful to everyone!  A HUGE, HUGE, HUGE thank you to Gary for taking time out of his busy schedule to help us!  Also, I’m still processing everything we went over, so check out everyone’s blogs for more tips I may have missed and examples of the food we brought and took pictures of in Gary’s studio!

From left to right,
Back row: Shannon, Jen, Sophie, me, Chels
Middle row: Lauren, Adrienne, Elina, Mary Kate
Front row:  Nicole, Cara, Kelly, Jen, Sues