Food Photography & Styling | May Assignment | Magazine Cover Inspiration | Bradenton-Sarasota Food Photographer

Back in January, I joined a circle of photographers who wanted to hone their food photography and styling skills.  It’s an awesome group to be a part of – an amazing circle of encouragement and support, both personal and professional.  These ladies rock.

Each month we tackle an assignment and post our results on our respective blogs on the 20th of the month (21st for this month).  This month’s challenge is to recreate a food magazine cover that inspires you.  Ha!!!  I’m a magazine junkie and thought it would be easy.

Um, not.

But….I love what I chose and it involved little to no styling props and lots of bright light and a white background which I lean towards.   And I already had a similar plate upon which the magazine food was presented.  So far so good.  *wink*

I finally got down to the business of making and shooting the dish late yesterday afternoon. Nothing like the last minute???  The dish is a main course salad from the Spring 2012 issue of Cook Fresh which is a supplemental publication by Fine Cooking magazine and published by Taunton.  The recipe – Grilled Asparagus and Steak Salad with Hoisin Vinaigrette – wasn’t difficult, but it had a lot of steps and then trying to replicate all the little bits of watercress and microgreens WAS trying, lol.  I started to feel a little cross-eyed needless to say.  Here is my result:

And that’s my watermelon, too, in the top corner.  A farmer’s market purchase on Saturday and delicious as well.

This was a good and interesting challenge – some of us (especially me) weren’t sure how closely to copy the magazine cover or not.   I felt I wanted to copy as closely as I could with of course giving the magazine credit.  It was really up to our personal interpretation this month.

Would you like to see my version and the magazine’s side-by-side?  Here you go……

I *think* I came pretty close – what do you think?  It was fun creating the sidebar titles but it took some time trying different fonts.  The bar code was a free clip art download.

Here’s a pull back of the scene and settings were shutter 1/80, ISO 320, and f/4.5:

Whew, I’m glad I manged to get through this month’s challenge!  Next up is Laurie Vengoechea | Southern California Food Photographer.|.  She is an amazing food photographer and heads up our group and rightfully so!  Please click through all of our blogs – they are linked as a circle.  Enjoy.  :)