Salt & pepper Dungeness crab.

Dungeness crab cake over avocado-banana mousse. Garnished with peppered pink-grapefruit supreme, lump crab meat and chive oil smear.

Panko-breaded pan-fried oysters over  lemon-white truffle aioli.

Geoduck siphon sashimi with pickled ginger.

Seared sea scallop over grated romanesco “couscous”.  Orange supreme & herb garnish.

Agnolotti with Maine lobster meat, chanterelles and a lobster sauce.  Fresh chive oil and chopped parsley help bring visual contrast to a dish that’s heavily representing various shades of cream, orange, and red.  This wasn’t purely a food styling decision, however, the dish is also very earthy, rich & creamy, so the fresh herbs help balance it on the palate.

Yuzu juice margarita with shiso leaf garnish & salted rim.

Mushrooms over porcini tagliatelle with lemon persillade & parmigiano reggiano.

Sous vide braised beef short ribs with poached egg and an herbed red-wine sauce.

Cooking Photograph – Stir frying cubed grass-fed beef, mushrooms and vegetables.

A spice-rubbed bone-in strip steak from our new line of grass-fed beef. Heirloom potatoes in background.

Grass-fed hanger steak, baby bok choy and udon noodles in a savory broth.

Spiced orange quail salad with maple candied walnuts. (the quail was cooked on a grill pan)

Mushroom squab-confit tart (topped with poached egg and frisee).  The cut yolk was purely a food styling decision – we carried the intact tart to our photo staging area and cut it just before photographing to lend moisture and additional color to the shot.

Chanterelle & Kobe beef stew over polenta. Topped with glazed pearl onions & white Alba truffles.

Strip-steak sous vide with sea salt, steamed asparagus & Israeli couscous.

Seared squab breasts with apricot-wine sauce over wild rice pancakes (cut with a ring mold to display texture).

I’ve been experimenting with photography for most of my life, but I’ve never had much practice photographing food. Mostly I’ve shot architecture or trees…things that don’t dry out, get cold, or melt.

Since starting this job I’ve been photographing food at home more, trying to get good at it. Here’s a white-chocolate-raspberry crème brulee I helped a friend make:

Once or twice I’ve had the chance to practice my food photography on the job, once Ryan (the MMM food photographer) has styled the plate and taken the primary shots going to be used on the Marx Foods web store and blog. He was recently kind enough to share one of my burger photos on the MMM blog.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to shoot a great food photo when you’ve had a pro style the plate for you, but I still had to jump on the opportunity immediately. Because MMM doesn’t use the sprays, lacquers and stand-in ingredients often found in the food photography biz, time is of the essence.

The camera has an unerring ability to pick up subtle visual clues in food that has already started to cool down or dry out. It’s hard to put your finger on what exactly you’re noticing, but somehow your brain knows when a dish is past its prime in a photo.

Food Photograph: Antelope Stew

Food Photograph: Roasted Alligator Tenderloin

Food Photograph: Vanilla Soup

Food Photograph: Maple Creme Brulee

Food Photograph: Squid Ink Pasta with Uni Sauce

Many process shots like this on the first day.

3,600 clicks of the shutter later we now had the job of editing down the photos to at least half for storage reasons, while picking out the shots for the MarxFoods Blog, processing them and getting them into the blog posts that will be released over the next few months. The whole process adds another couple of days to the project making it almost a weeklong event.

Justin’s brother Keith who runs one of our sister companies for the food service industry was in Seattle for the photo shoot. Well not exactly, but it was a good excuse to go all out with meat photography. He also demonstrated some fancy butchery for us like butchering a spider rack.

Here are a few of the more interesting finished food photographs.