One scene I wanted to photograph for my most recent book, The California Farm Table Cookbook, was a spring brunch. In addition to the book highlighting food producers, I included a small flower producer, Laurie, who is now a friend. This brunch allowed me to show off her beautiful floral arrangements in the book.
Laurie invited me to her backyard where she grows her flowers for her arrangements. Here, we set up a spring brunch scene. She put together some arrangements for the table. I prepared the foods from the book and drove the 2 ½ hours to her home in California’s Central Valley bringing along props, linens, and my gear.
First, we have the flowers. While the food was important, this was the part of the book where I was highlighting Laurie and her work so they needed a prominent place in the photo.
In our planning call, I shared that I liked long stem, earthy, wabi-sabi style arrangements and we selected her vintage vases together through texting photos.
Laurie loves a peach color palette so I told her to create what she loved. I planned to keep plates white or light and linens neutral so I knew I could make whatever I needed to work with the color palette she chose. These were the flowers for the shoot:
I brought a table and surfaces, but she had this vintage desk that she often photographed her flowers on. We moved that to the yard and things began to take shape.
The foods I wanted to include from the book were:
Sliced Chicken Salad in Curry Dressing
Garden Deviled Eggs
Candied Walnut, Citrus, and Fennel Salad
Lemon Pistachio Scones
I had to travel the distance to the shoot so I selected only cold picnic foods that I knew would hold up both through the travel and the styling time. I made them all the night before the shoot and garnished on set.
Side note and a tangent: My original plan was to include my Deep-Dish Artichoke Bacon Quiche in the brunch shoot. It was my number one pick. It turned out that the day I was supposed to prep all the food, my husband hurt his back and I spent all day in the emergency room. I came back to my kitchen in the evening and stayed up most of the night prepping the food to leave early the next morning. My point? It’s important to be flexible when doing this kind of work for yourself. Always have a plan B. It turns out the photo worked just fine without the quiche.
I brought a few garnishes like chives and cilantro with me, but Laurie had some gorgeous edible flowers blooming at the time of the shoot. We used these to garnish the deviled eggs along with the chives I had and added some cilantro flowers to the chicken salad.
I thought ahead of time what serving bowls would work well with the food and brought a few extras to choose from in case I thought otherwise on set. Once we had that table, I knew the table runner I brought wasn’t needed. With the table and flowers, everything else needed to be simple:
A mug to hold utensils.
A stack of linen napkins.
A stack of different-sized serving plates.
Some serving utensils.
Note: I have one full set of plates that I purchased from a ceramicist several years ago. It includes four each of large, medium, and small plates. While I don’t buy multiples of a lot of things, investing in and having this large set has been really great for scenes just like this where a coordinating stack of plates is the best option.
I also had to make sure that whatever angle I chose only got the green grass and not all dirt of the garden. Of course, this could be filled in during editing, but it was easier to do my best to capture only the grass in the frame.
I started with a setup for an overhead shot. We moved the table a few times as I worked so that we could get some soft, dappled light through the trees.
I like the photo and I did submit it for consideration by the art team, but it didn’t highlight the flowers enough for me. I didn’t know how I’d feel at the time of the shoot, so I took many angles. This shoot was only going to happen once and I wanted multiple options to choose from.
An angled shot was much better at showing off the flowers. I submitted this one, too, but had to admit that the chicken salad was not my favorite dish on the table.
The photo that was finally selected was this one with the eggs as the hero. I felt they were much more attractive than the chicken salad and worked better with the flowers. While all the arrangements are not in the frame, the ones that made it in frame are striking. The touch of floral landscape in the background works well, too.
Another note: Each of these recipes is in the book with their own photo. I allowed enough time to photograph three of them the same day as this shoot because I wanted the backgrounds and props to coordinate in the book between the recipe chapters and the final menu chapter where this brunch photo is featured.
This is how it came together in the book:
Questions? I’m happy to answer them.
