Food & Function

Photography is a thoughtful process. It is the “seeing” that is the hard part. One of the things I love about the job is figuring out the concepts behind a new assignment.

I got a call from David Julian McClements, a faculty member of the Food Science department at Umass Amherst. He asked if I was interested in doing the cover for Food and Function, the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London.

The assignment was to illustrate his research on “Excipient Foods: Designing Food Matrices that Improve the Oral Bioavailability of Pharmaceuticals and Nutraceuticals”. David gave me a list of ingredients that would be appropriate: salad dressing, yogurt, cream, sauce, vegetables, vitamins, berries, and fruit.

This all kind of terrified me but after reading his paper and pacing around for a few hours I had a plan. I went to Dave’s pet food city and bought a small glass aquarium. At wall mart I found cheap canola oil and fish oil and vitamin E capsules. Then to Stop and Shop and Serious market for berries olives and fruit.

I filled the aquarium with a 2 inch layer of the oil and started cutting thin slices of the food and arranging the ingredients in the oil. I also drizzled a small amount of balsamic vinegar and shook up the tank to create some bubbles. I shot from above and lighted it from underneath with a Paul C buff Einstein studio flash. The camera was a Canon 5Dmk11 with a Canon 100mm 2.8 macro lens.