The Bounty, of Oregon That Is

One of the nicest things about working in a collaborative environment like Polara Studio is how we often “feed” off each others creativity for ideas, images and inspiration.

Jeremy, one of our videographers, spent a weekend hunting for something that Oregon is rightfully famous for, mushrooms. He didn't have much luck as these wonderfully tasty little gems take part science and part arcane magic to find. Nevertheless he was determined to eat some mushrooms so went off to the local Farmers Market and bought two big bags of morels.

That afternoon at Polara, he brought those two big bags to the studio, smelling wonderfully of green and earth. As a food photographer at Polara, I asked Jeremy if he could hold off on dinner while I did something with them. I took them up to the natural light studio with an old piece of metal and a bottle of olive oil and just started “following” the light. That's how this first photograph was made. For our photo friends reading this I'm shooting with a Nikon D4 and a 85mm tilt/shift lens. This is a great combo that allows spontaneity at the highest image quality while giving control for both depth of field and focus plane. God did most of the lighting (and does a great job BTW) with a little assist from a white card and a shaving mirror.

In the meantime, Jeremy looked up a recipe on how how to prepare his prizes. One peek at that gave me an idea for a neat image pair, showing this yummy food raw and ready to eat. An old cast iron frying pan and a little of the same lighting and this second photograph was created (with a little help from Chef Jeremy).

The only sad part is that many of his mushrooms didn't make it home as we both ate a fair number of them after shooting. The morels, sauteed with little onion and garlic, had a taste reminiscent of a nice steak, rich and almost beefy. It is always fun to see how, with a little creative collaboration a the bounty of Oregon can make those little things in life both look and taste a bit better.