How Magazines Photograph Food in a Manhattan Daylight Chef's Kitchen Photo Rental Studio

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Manhattan, New York, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) January 8, 2011 -- Have you ever wondered how magazines photograph those beautiful food pictures that you see in the Glossy magazines like Good Housekeeping,Women's Day or Food Network? Well you are about to get an insiders sneek peek at how these top culinary magazines and many others make it all happen.

First you need a state of the art, professionally equipped chef's kitchen, daylight rental food photo studio. These are not your run of the mill photo studios. These are specially designed photographic daylight photo studios that have been set up with a full state of the art chef's kitchen within the photo studio itself. For example, Eagles Nest Studios in mid town Manhattan, is one of the premier daylight chef kitchen studios that is used by so many of the top culinary and food magazines. Eagles Nest has been specially equipped with two large refrigerators to hold and store the enormous amounts of food that a food stylists or their assistant will bring to a food shoot. Eagles Nest Studios is equipped with large stainless steel chopping tables that is at the right height for the food stylists to work on without straining their backs from bending over chopping all day.The top food kitchen chef's studios, such as Eagles Nest Studios, in mid town Manhattan, will have an abundance of cooking and chef's tools at hand for the food stylists to use such as a kitchen aid, multiple types of blenders, mixing bowls,a large variety of pots, pans, skillets and frying pans. Plus the assorted measuring cups, sifters, graters,cookie sheets, cooling racks, rolling pins etc. I think you get the picture. It is a lot of tools that they may or may not use but it is better to have it and not need it than to have to send the assistant out in the middle of the shoot to go get some small but needed item.

O .K. so the studio needs a great well equiped kitchen for the food stylists to do their thing and create their art but what about the photographer? What do they need? Well the main ingrediant for the photographer, besides a high quality digital camera, is a great unobstructed natural south or west daylight studio. Again that is just another reason the top food photographers time and again to choose Eagles Nest Studios over so many of its other competitors. Because it has great unobstructed south and west daylight for the photographers to give their photos that crisp natural daylight look that makes the food look so yummy and delicious. With all of the tall densely packed buildings in New York City it is not that easy to find such beautiful unbstructed light that Eagles Nest Studios has to offer. Once the photographer is on set he manipulates the daylight slightly by using a silk or a diffusion material to soften the light slightly. The softened natural daylight coming through a silk will wrap itself around the subject matter and create crisp highlights but soft filled in shadow areas. The soft filled shadow areas still provide plenty of detail for the magazines printer to work with on their end of the technical spectrum.

Now before any of this can all come together the food has to be put on something and artistcly arranged. That is where the prop stylist comes in. It falls on their shoulders to go out and "Prop" for the photos once the art director gives them a story line and a style direction. They comb high and low through all of the best prop houses available in New York City for just the perfect surface, be it a wood table top or a slab of granite. Then there are the perfect plates, silverware, glasses,linens, napkins, any additional props like leaves etc. It can seem like an overwhelming, daunting task but this is what the professional stylist lives for. To put it all together and help create the "style" or flavor of the image. And this is all done prior to the shoot. Once the day of the shoot arrives they have all of the props delivered to the studio. They then must unpack and organize each prop by the specific shot list given to them by the art director and start once again pre visualizing how each shot will come together.

As the food stylist goes down the shot list and prepares the food for each shot, the stylist is working with the magazine art director and/or food editor to pick out just the right props for each shot. They give the "hero" prop plate to the food stylist to assemble the plate which is then taken quickly over to the set where the patient photographer and his assistant have been waiting. While on set the food stylist makes any last minute adjustments to the image. The photographer shoots several variations of the plated and propped food which are quickly viewed on his computer screen. Any changes to the shot are then made at this time. Once the photograph has been approved by the art and food editors the fod gets dumped into the trash can and the cycle repeats itself. On to the next shot. Depending on the story or the article a food stylist might have to cook and produce anywhere from five to eighteen shots in an eight hour day. If they are producing a cookbook the shot list generally tends to be longer. Once they have shot everything on the shot list and the day is done everyone packs up their various kits of equipment and it is off to the next shoot to repeat it all over again with only the memories of suger cookies and cupcakes dancing in their head.

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