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

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!

One of the highlights of my trip to Peru in January was to do a shoot with a well-known Food Stylist from Lima named Cecilia Cuadra de  Zegarra. Her website is http://www.cecuze.com if you want to have a look.

We managed to get quite a lot of shots done in a day. It was great to see one dish after the next of delicious Peruvian Cuisine coming out of the kitchen. Being in a foreign country with no assistant and very little gear, I hand-made some on-set tools such as reflector cards and fill cards, and shot with all natural light… even trying to rent strobes just for backup proved to be a challenge not worth pursuing. I love shooting with natural light, anyway, so it all worked out for the best. We were all very happy with the results.

I’m looking forward to more shoots in Peru during some of my upcoming visits.

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.