Every Month when the magazine spreads Michael and I create hit the news stands with work we produced months prior, I can wait to open the emails to see what the brilliant designers do with our images. The folks over at 425 Magazine are truly one of a kind. Have you ever wondered how a magazine spread comes to life? Before working in the industry I had no idea! I always admired, even tore out inspiring recipes and photos but I never imagined the behind the scenes aspect of creating these beautiful spreads. We are blessed for sure to be working in our field and I thought it’d be great to give you a behind the scenes look at what goes into a Magazine shoot.
The brainstorm… The editor of a magazine or art director will come to us with a idea. Then my mind starts swirling with all the visuals. They will often times say ‘ok we’ve got x number of pages and we need x number of images’. Often times its up to 6 months in advance. We will even start working on our Thanksgiving and Christmas projects here in the next month!
For this smoothie shoot we needed to fill a 6 page spread so we came up with clever EASY recipes to make those pages exciting. I am all about taking one recipe and dolling it up to create a few tasty recipes from a master recipe. ALL my recipes are original, unless cited. I wanted to be a bit more fluffy and colorful for this shoot. We picked out surfaces and glass wear that would show off the recipe but add a punchy look.
We always want to make our clients happy so really my job is to take the editors vision and bring it to life on the screen. Any buzz words they drop, I am picking up on. Bright, fresh, new flavor combos… Next, I get with my hubby Mike and we start laying it out. We could be driving, or hanging out on the couch watching our fav shows. We will start tossing out ideas, how about we? Maybe it’d be kind of cool to shoot it this way? I will explain a vision then Mike says ok or what if we did it this way? We really need to be on the same page creatively to produce just what the client has requested! We then put the shoot into our rotation of work.
On shoot days, I get the ingredients while Michael sets up the shoot. We shoot everywhere, on location, in a studio or in our home kitchen! He is the best at lighting and back dropping and surfacing the shoot. He will crank out some test shots and we will talk about how the test shots are coming out. I set down the styled food and he works his magic! He will call out when he’s got the shot and I head back to the kitchen to create another element. After we wrap up, Michael edits and designs a unified look to submit to the specified publisher. He will submit the requested number of photos, normally up to 30 and then I do the writing. I often submit my words a day or two later. We wait for direction, do they like it? Does it require a reshoot or re-edit? Once we’ve heard, we wait. Their designers bring it all together and give it a personality. 3-6 months later we get the email with the proofs once it hits stands! The entire process is so cool, creating content that goes into peoples homes that they cook or make for their families is a gift and we don’t take it for granted.
Here are the images from the smoothie shoot after the designer made them sing! So fun right? Enjoy!
