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There you have it—twelve more minutes and counting.

- Kyle

Join food photographer Kyle Dreier and food stylist Teresa Blackburn for a couple hours of fun, food and photography.

7 to 9 pm Thursday June 30, 2011. Register at www.shooteatlearn.com

There’s a certain amount of ingenuity and resourcefulness about photography that I kinda like. OK, I actually crave it, a lot. All my life I’ve been a tinkerer. I get it honestly from my parents who are tinkerers and encouraged my brother and me to tinker by taking apart random things and build whatever we dreamed up in our heads.

My dad grew up on a farm so he learned to tinker and be resourceful out of necessity. Suffice it to say that growing up on the farm didn’t offer the conveniences of just running down to the store and buying what you needed … hardware stores and money to purchase items were scarce in the day. To this day he’s off the chart with inventing and constructing crazy ideas he has in his head. See Moozie.

My mom is one to exercise her creative exploits in the kitchen, on canvas and with sewing machine. (But not all at the same time. That’d be weird.) To this day she experiments with ideas like “What would happen if I put this ingredient in this recipe?” My comfort level in the kitchen and much of my fascination with food can be attributed to her allowing me to “help” in the kitchen. I’ll spare you the story of my making eggnog for a dinner party when I was fourteen.

Ice cream! (I’m now imagining Eddie Murphy’s routine. I digress.)

On a normal client shoot I’d have one of my food stylists bear the responsibility of preparing and styling the ice cream, but because I enjoy this kind of stuff I wanted to have some play time of my own. Besides, it gives me a better appreciation and understanding for what is involved in creating this freak of nature food look alike.

Gone are the days when instant mashed potatoes and Crisco were the preferred ingredients for fake ice cream for photography … at least for me. This new (to me) concoction is simply ready made store bought frosting and an inordinate amount of powdered sugar. Oh, and don’t forget the Cuisinart food processor … or two … the slight burning smell might be an indication that I was pushing the limits. I did three different batches and experimented with the different blade sets. The dough blade (plastic vs. the metal chopping blade) seems to put less strain on the motor … judging by the absence of the burning electric smell when using them.

The result is a pliable doughish mass that balls up in the food processor. From there I transfer it to a ZipLock bag and can scoop it out like ice cream. It’s amazing the consistency and how it fooled even my biggest ice cream critics — my 5, 6 and 8 year old boys. Aside from making scoops, I also made some soft serve ice cream. That required making more of a sticky, less solid mixture that I piped out from a pastry bag with an extra large tip. I discovered that having Popeye arms would be beneficial for this task.

I let one of the scoops sit out for a full week to see what it would look like. It held up amazingly well. In fact, the chocolate fudge drizzle on top held as well … straight from the bottle without doctoring. See what I mean? These were just left to sit out on the counter.

Here are the results from the studio setup. Anyone hungry for some nice cold fake ice cream?

There you have it. While fake, these are still edible, but who’d want to? My boys.

- Kyle

So, in the meantime, I can show you a couple of photos from our Charlotte Magazine food shoot that was a few months ago since it has since been published.

Banana Waffle.

Ham and Green Onion Scone.

As always, a huge credit goes to our food stylists. For these particular images, food styling acrobatics were provided by the talented and culinarily creative Whitney Kemp. You rock Whitney!

Look for more images from our food photography shoots with Charlotte Magazine in the future. Up next … beer. North Carolina beer, that is!

Until then,
Kyle

So, now you can see what an eight hour day here in the studio looks like … condensed down to two minutes.

Special thanks, as always, to our fantastic team …

Rory White ~ first assistant, pancakeologist

Teresa Blackburn ~ food stylist, miracle maker

Nancy Vienneau ~ recipe developer, sunshine

Matt Huesmann ~ video producer, story teller

And me, Kyle Dreier ~ food photographer, mad scientist

This was fun and I’m getting giddy about our next video.

- Kyle

When it comes to styling what is a great looking food product to begin with there are certain challenges to arise. The camera sees everything. I mean everything. That’s the advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of shooting with a 40 megapixel PhaseOne digital back. Shooting at super high resolution provides fantastic image quality and huge files but it also shows any slight oddity that might present itself in the food. One example were some teeny tiny sugar crystal garnishes that hitched a ride on an unsuspecting cupcake during transport.

So, the food styling wasn’t anything too terribly crazy on this shoot, just different than keeping a burger patty looking fresh or making sure pasta didn’t dry out. There’s nothing better than having a beautiful subject, and I can tell you, these cupcakes were outstanding creations … and very cooperative as well.

After we completed the photography I had a little fun dissecting a number of the cupcakes and … well, uh … we had a cupcake ping pong party here at the studio. Thanks to John, Michael, Elvis, Cory and Burk for coming by to share in the left overs from the shoot. The only thing missing was a nice tall cold glass of milk.

-Kyle

What draws me to the kitchen? I think it’s a little like a mad scientist being drawn to his own laboratory. There’s a thing happening with all the senses … visual, smell, touch … and there’s also an element of “ooo, what are we going to build today?” Enter mad scientist laugh … “muu-ha-ha.”

For fun, I grabbed my DSLR and snapped a few photos of some interesting color and shape as it was happening in preparation for the real shot on set involving kitchen products/utensils. This is what I was seeing as it happened in the kitchen.

It’s fun to just capture what is happening naturally compared to spending one to two hours on a single dish. (Honestly, I enjoy the tedium of highly controlled shots as well as the spontaneity of these “as they happen” shots.)

So, here are a couple fast un-styled food related shots from our studio kitchen.

There you have it. Now you see what I saw.

- Kyle