Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Cooking/Photography Class with Lisa Wiseman

My good friend Lisa and I have been batting around the idea of a sharing of talents for quite some time now.  I am a chef by trade wanting to improve my photography and she is a photographer wanting to improve her cooking.

We finally were able to align our crazy schedules and make it happen.  I went to the San Francisco Farmers Market to get all we would need then met up with her and her fiancee Josh to begin cooking.  A quick photo/email from my phone assured Lisa that I had arrived at the market early enough to secure the amazing-and-much-sought-after Soul Food Farms chickens and eggs.  Try them for yourself and you'll realize why it was such an important ingredient for the meal.

Lisa stealthily snapped some shots as we made our way through the preparations and wrote a nice post on the experience.

A friend of theirs joined us for dinner and Lisa and I finished the night with a lesson on flash photography...now its time to practice what I learned.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Birthday Shooting



I just got an amazing new lens and had the perfect opportunity to take it for a test drive!


I got this Canon 70-200 2.8 IS lens and rented the 2X extender, making it a 400 mm lens.  Well, technically more like a 640 mm lens with the Canon 30D that I shoot with.


I decided to try the lens out at the recent Presidents Cup Matches at Harding Park in San Francisco.  For those non-golfers of you out there (imagine that on a food/photography related blog) the Presidents Cup is a competition between the 12 best US golfers against the 12 best International (minus Europe) golfers in a match play format.  It is very much the same competition as the Ryder Cup where the US competes against Europe.


As I knew I would not be able to bring in camera gear on the competition days without press credentials, I decided to go on the first practice day (did I mention it also happened to be my birthday?).


It turned out to be the best weather of the entire competition and a whole lot of fun!


Here are a few of my favorite shots: