Chugrad McAndrews Photography – San Francisco Food, Advertising and Catalog Photography

I have had the good fortune to work with many wonderful people at Safeway producing images for an in-store display campaign. There is a new store in Santa Cruz, California that is taking a new approach to their infrastructure – namely, lots of these built-in display cases featuring beauty shots of the food in a given section.

For this round I shot three posters – one of Iced Tea, another of an apple, selling apple juice, and a third was some fruit and yogurt for a composited image selling yogurt. Keep an eye out for these if you visit the store in person, and check back here to see more in the future.

I worked on a fantastic project with the wonderful folks at Ten Speed Press. This was a book about Allergy-Free Baking. The author was able to create recipes that avoid the use of ingredients that cause most of the common allergies, including many allergies often overlooked, or not included in other books. We made cookies, cakes, cupcakes, scones, and other tasty treats. The author wanted to create a book that would allow parents to bake for kids who otherwise couldn’t have birthday cake, for example. Of course we had to “test” everything and it was all delicious!

When I had the good fortune to marry my wife, I also, of course, gained many new relatives. Among them was her grandmother. She was born and raised in the Andes in Peru, speaking the native language Quechua as her first language. She had 13 children, only 7 of whom lived to become adults. She has a deeply wise presence and a way about her that is rough, but unmistakably loving.

I am always fascinated by families and how certain physical and cultural traits transform with each new generation – there is always a strain of connection, sometimes more noticeable, sometimes less. Often, the same nose or eyes or lips or ears can be seen on every face in a family over 5 generations or more. I like seeing and making photos where the similarities and differences can be studied. On a cultural note, my wife’s Abuelita is fluent in her native language, my wife’s mother understands everything her mother says but can only speak about 80%, and my wife understands even less and can barely speak Quechua. Quechua is now officially on the “endangered list” of languages. They all three speak Spanish as well, although Abuelita struggles with it. My wife and her mother are also fluent in English.

I have had the opportunity on a few occasions to make some portraits of Abuelita. She has always been a very cooperative and eager subject and I plan to do little shoots with her every opportunity I get. As people get older, there is always a little uncertainty about how many future opportunities there will be to make images of them, so I often try to squeeze something in.

Have you ever seen a full-grown cow be cut into many tiny pieces and prepped for consumption? This may be a challenging visual for some but it’s perfectly natural. I mean, if one chooses to be a meat-eater, one should intimately understand the process of acquiring meat, and arguably know the intricate details of butchering, preserving, and preparing meat. The children at the scene in Peru were very accustomed to seeing this process, but back in the U.S., my mother didn’t appreciate the task of trying to “explain” these photos to my nieces who are 6 and 8 years old. Admittedly, I was a bit squeamish to touch the beast myself and kept to my role as photographer, but my wife was right there getting her hands bloody with the rest of the 6-person dismantling team. This cow died from an over-inflated stomach that, within 2 hours, put so much pressure on her heart that it stopped ticking (you could say a “natural cause”). This is not uncommon on the ranch but is still a great economic burden when it happens. These cows are intended for milking only – for the production of cheese, which they sell, but when one dies, the whole crew has to switch gears and butcher it immediately to make the most use of all the animal parts, feed many families, and even sell some of what’s left over.

My Grandfather was a sweet, gentle character. He had soft, Grandpa hands and a warm, comforting smile. He was honest to the core, always had something positive to say, and put family and love above all else.

When he was a young man he gave up a potential future as a saxophone player in a Big Band to become a Lawyer. He fought in the Navy in World War II, then came back home and had a bunch more kids like many did in the Baby-Boom era – 6 kids total. He was the quintessential family man, living the American Dream.

When his wife died at age 80 he could barely see a reason to live. All his children, then adults with their own kids, gathered around him and lent him daily support to get him through this time of struggle, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. He cried every day for years remembering how much he loved his wife, but always mentioned how grateful he was for the support of his children and grandchildren.

I made photos of him over the years at various times – sometimes capturing his natural, sparkling personality, and sometimes using him as a model for an idea I wanted to pursue. One series was reflecting on the concept of loneliness and the many ways it can manifest in our lives… in his case it was deeply impactful to see him living alone in his large house where he had raised 6 children with his wife… going to bed alone, doing the dishes and laundry, doing bills and writing letters.

He lived to be 97 with virtually no physical problems until he passed peacefully in the arms of my mother.

I stopped in to make some photos at the Vella Cheese Company in Sonoma while I was on assignment for Napa Sonoma Magazine. I was shooting for a story about Jeff Bundschu of the Gundlach Bundschu winery and he happened to like this  cheese company. When my assistant and I entered, we could understand why – great smells and incredible varieties of house-made cheeses. But for me, the real fun started when I got to tour the production facilities and make photos “backstage”.

I love it when I get a chance to go behind the scenes at any type of manufacturing facility. I am endlessly fascinated by the various machines (including humans) with their essential roles, and how they interact with each other to create a finished product. Sometimes this process uses simple laws of physics, like at an Olive-Processing Plant I visited, there was a water bath after the “pitting” machine did it’s magic a hundred times per second or something crazy like that, and the olives would then float if they were successfully pitted, or sink in the water bath if they still retained the pit – simple genius. When I used to work on jobs shooting Semiconductors in clean-rooms, however, their manufacturing machines were so super high-tech I couldn’t even begin to explain how they worked… I just admired their industrial beauty and was fascinated by their functions.

The first room we got into was super humid because there were huge baths of hot liquid – huge enough for two baby elephants to bathe comfortably. I already knew there was no way we could shoot in there and sure enough, when I looked at my lens, it was all fogged up. We had to wait a little while until they got to the next stage of the process and dehumidified the room. In the meantime, we went into the refrigerated aging rooms to see all the cheese wheels in various stages of aging… so many beautiful shades of brown, and a final coating of cocoa on the outside – just beautiful. We followed the wheels downstairs onto a cart and ended up in the front of the store where they sell to the general public. We slipped back into the first room, now dehumidified, to find them stacking the fresh wheels onto a huge rolling cart with cloth between each layer. We collected the images we needed there, and headed on our way, happily munching samples.