I saw one of my favorite Chicago food photographers, Sandy Noto, share some of her favorite images that she created throughout last year. I thought that was such a nice wrap up of the year that I gathered some of my favorite images from 2019. These are a combination of client work and personal work.
2019 was a big year for me, branching out into more regular restaurant work, moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan, playing with harsh light and flash photography, lots of film photography, new pastry techniques, lots of landscape and travel photography, and a lot more knowledge about cameras and photography in general. And though I constantly feel like a better and better photographer, the more I learn, the more I realize that I have just scratched the surface when it comes to photography and food photography. It’s a really good thing I absolutely love learning because I believe this will be lifelong creative venture for me.
Film has influenced me a lot this year because it’s made me a lot more intentional about framing a shot, rather than firing off your camera at lightning speed and hoping that just one turns out. It’s also been really fun to document some of our travels on film. There’s something really timeless about a film photo and I’m really proud to say that I haven’t ruined a roll yet! Thanks goes to those two film classes in high school. Apparently they really stuck with me!
I also have really branched out when it comes to lighting this year. This year I took on a lot of projects that required flash photography, the most high stakes one involving a chef in a beautiful room (second image in the gallery), but an oddly lit one. And, low and behold, the photo turned out better than I could have imagined. Flash has been a really great experience for me this year, but I also was turned onto harsh light food photography, which really opened up a lot of creative doors for me! One of my favorite harsh light images was for Material Kitchen (the image of the knife block on a pink background). That was a big breakthrough for me and I absolutely loved creating that image.
Lastly, I explored a lot with my cameras this year and turned out some of my favorite images of all time while traveling around the country and the UK. Our home is littered with our Scotland and Ireland travel photos and I’m not sad about it at all. I also really thought about taking intentional photos, rather than the expected ones that I researched before our trip that I really wanted to photograph. I now have the images I wanted to take from my perspective, but I also thought a lot about thinking creatively and actively trying to produce an image that hadn’t been created before. It’s much harder than just taking the obvious image and I would love to be more intentional with my photography choices this year.
All in all, after looking through all of the images I took this year (excluding my family and wedding photography which might be another wrap up), I’m really proud of how far I’ve come and of the many awesome shots I took last year. Here’s to more good food and good photography in 2020!
–Hannah
