cover models and photo-worthy foods: what it takes to shoot a book cover

The book is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality. Last weekend was the Love Diet photo shoot. The plan was in a half day shoot to capture not only our cover images, but also the author photo and 3 recipes for back cover images.

It was a hard call to decide whether or not the book needed color interior illustrations. The intended audience for this book falls into two camps. It is a diet book and will easily fit into the diet and self-help section of any store. But at the end of the day, Life of Reiley produces gift books, perfect for gourmet food stores, gift baskets and those little quirky gift stores everyone on our creative team loves to browse.

Now diet books, unless they’re fat hardcover numbers, don’t all that often have food photos. But gift books… well, gift books have to have something to offer besides text. The final decision was to take a flirty twist on a pretty classic solution: illustrations. In other words, the interior of our book will be dotted with more of the wonderful works by our favorite artist, Kersti Frigell. (If you thumb a few of the diet paperbacks produced over the past decade, you might be surprised to discover that many are warmed up with illustrations. So our decision really pulls from both of the markets we wish to cover – but on our terms with sass and sensuality.)

So why, then, do photos at all? As much as we love our little pen and ink art moments, my book designer Deborah Daly and I still understand the power of a juicy, color photograph. With our previous two works (fork me, spoon me and kiss my bundt), the cover sells the book. As much as I like to think its the brilliant recipes, its Deborah’s covers that get books off the store shelves and into shopping bags.

And so, we get to the heart of this blog post. Last Sunday JC and I gathered with Deborah, photographer Margeaux Bestard and her assistant Courtney. I first met Margeaux when she attended a cooking class in my test kitchen. (She came with her sister, Nicole, who is a very savvy wine publicist I’ve known for years.) Margeaux sent me some of her images and I was captivated by her ability to give food a soul. I knew she’d be the perfect photographer to put a title like “The Love Diet” into a single image. I also knew that as long as I had Margeaux and her equipment, I wanted to get a few food shots, a little back cover surprise to whet the buyer’s appetite.

The cover image was going to be the toughest, so we jumped straight in. Deborah and I had been talking about the image of an apple, the symbol of both love and health as the heart of our message. Without really knowing exactly how that apple was going to look on our cover, Margeaux started scouting for the right background while Deborah played with JC and Courtney’s hands, moving them as though they were living, breathing clay. They next thing I knew, we had a heart made from two hands, with a polished apple resting at the center on a background of intertwine, creeping fig vines. (I am a control freak but sometimes, when I just give myself over to Deborah’s creative instinct, we achieve things beyond that which I dare to dream.)

Cover image put to bed, we moved on to food shots. For the shoot, Deborah and I selected three dishes that were not only photogenic but also intended to give the reader inspiration that this was not your mama’s grapefruit diet. Our photos showcase a 4 layer chocolate cake, salt-crusted shrimp and a raspberry champagne cocktail. “Yes, these are the kinds of foods to expect on our diet!” we hope they will scream.

Food can be difficult to photograph. Slick, big-budget magazines may have us snowed into thinking food is always beautiful, but I’ve seen way too many cookbooks and low-budget commercials to know that it takes a special eye and ability to use light to give food eye appeal on the page. The food photography for our books always stresses me out – that is until I look into Margeaux’s lens and see something that somehow looks completely different than what appears to my untrained eye. The girl always manages to find this certain light, a certain angle – even if it means scrunching into the tightest space, balancing arched backwards, contorting into impossible forms, she always seems to capture something more magical than just a plate of food.

Lastly, we captured the very necessary author photo. Shoulder to shoulder JC and I stood (apples in hand, of course) as Margeaux snapped away from above, below, straight on until our smiles dissolved into the rowdy play of children.

The day ended with champagne and cake. Yes, readers, the best thing about photo shoots sometimes isn’t the images, its the leftovers! Yum.

whatever it takes

mmmmm CAKE!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 6:50 pm and is filed under mechanics of making a cookbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.