Over the school Christmas/New Year break my wife Amy came up with an inspiration to write a new blog. She has been writing her education blog for a couple of years, but this one was to be fun and interesting, to her, and hopefully to others. The subject is healthy eating and how to cook at home, at least 4 nights a week, economically and healthily. I was the obvious choice to collaborate with her on creating photographs of the food, living there in the house as I do.

It is a cool idea, and one that I think is useful to people who want to make vegetarian food that is interesting, tasty, made from scratch and comes complete with Weight Watchers® points already calculated. Each day's post comes with an appetizing photo (hopefully) of the unadulterated, plated food. Our thinking was to create very simple, real photographs that show the dish just as we are about to eat dinner. These food shots are not 'produced', but neither are they of the 'road-kill' variety that I see too often, that make me wince.

Home made pizza

I love well-prepared food that tastes and looks great. Nothing makes me more depressed than to eat in a big-box restaurant and to be served a mountain of food. I know that restaurants in the US are pretty much forced to do that to avoid the 'tiny-portion' mockery, but to me food is about taste, not quantity. So the shots are simple in terms of gear in that I shoot hand-held, with my assistant (Amy) holding a single speed light bouncing off a sheet of white, office supply store, foam core. I could obsess with modifiers, fill-cards, etc., as I do for clients, but we want to show real, ready to eat, enticing dishes. Plus, we want to eat!

Check it out: http://fournightsaweek.wordpress.com/