WMMB Grilled Cheese Academy 2016 Recipe Winners

by Scott Lanza September 16, 2016 in Food Photography, Shoot Details, Studio Photography 0 comments tags: Food, Grilled Cheese Academy, How Too, Photography, Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board
This past July, the annual winning recipes from the WMMB Grilled Cheese Academy “2016 Grilled Cheese Recipe Showdown” were photographed at my studio! Joining me on the 3 day shoot ( the first day was prep and then two shoot days ) were the fabulous and reliable crew that I’ve had the pleasure to work with since the very first “Cheese & Burger Society” shoot from 2009. That group consists of, from Shine United, the agency, AD John Krull, AE Corissa Bielefeldt, the client Dave Bavinka, my production assistant Sandie Borowski, and the fabulous food stylist team of Vanessa Dubiel and her assistants Thomas Sherman and Christina Zerkis! The project started out with prepping the studio with the two sets we use, the first for the three winners which is the same set and lighting scheme used when we shot the very first grilled cheese sandwiches for the original website, the second a daylight simulating environmental set for the runner up recipes. Also some hardware setup that I do which consists of the wiring up the 60Amp service for the 3 foot griddle I rent for the shoot and prepping the kitchen for the intense 2 days of activity! I […]

The Wisconsin Cheese Cupid Project

by Scott Lanza September 07, 2016 in Shoot Details 0 comments tags: Food, How Too, Photography, Wisconsin Cheese Cupid, Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board
A bunch of years ago I was asked by John Krull, then senior art director at the time, at a new Madison ad agency, Shine United to photograph imagery for a new Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board website. The website, Wisconsin Cheese Cupid is a beverage and Wisconsin cheese online pairing guide. The project consisted of photographing beverages ranging from wines, champagnes to beers and liquors along with the cheeses featured on the site. The cheese shots were pretty straight forward but the beverage shots were another story! We used a Riedel Glassware “Wine & Glass Guide” brochure for reference as how we wanted the glassware   to look on the site! At first glance shooting the glassware against a black background with strong rim light looked starlight forward. Not! We realized that shooting the glassware and getting the same look as the Riedel brochure would take more that a single shot because of how the rim light reflected in the opposite side of the glass from the light source! We would need to shoot the glassware then, Chad Bollenbach, Shine’s brilliant retoucher would crop down the center in Photo Shop and duplicate the good side and flop it! Because we […]

The Great Cheese Makers Awards Caper

by Scott Lanza July 13, 2016 in Shoot Details 0 comments tags: Cheese Makers, Lighting, People, Photography, WCMA Awards
This year my friend Matt from Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board asked me to shoot the winners of the World Champion Cheese Contest sponsored by Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association downtown at the Wisconsin Center. This shoot came in the middle of the WMMB 2017 Tool Box shoot that was in full gear at my studio that week. We cut our recipe shoot short that day, packed up the gear, background and headed downtown, joined by my trusty side kick and friend Mark Derse, who helped out with lighting set up and general wrangling and positioning of the winners as they filed through our lighting gauntlet. Matt warned me that it would be a fast and furious pace as there were going to be hundreds of cheese makers to photograph and little time with each! He wasn’t kidding!! At first, the pace was manageable but soon there was a line all the way back to the awards stage. I had only time to make one capture of each subject, waited for it to pop up on the computer screen, do a quick glance to be sure eyes were open and nothing weird going on, then on to the next! This went on […]

The Top Note Shoot

by Scott Lanza June 30, 2016 in Product Photography, Shoot Details, Studio Photography 0 comments tags: Lighting, Photography, Product
I recently shot a project for Anthologie for their client Top Note Tonics, a start up company in Milwaukee that crafts unique artisanal tonic concentrates. The art director needed high end product shots of the clients bottled products for their new website and collateral uses. I created a typical lighting set-up to make the bottles almost like they were photo illustrated and made a photo record of the set to show  the company owners what’s involved to shoot products like theirs to give the results they were given. After retouching the final result was quite well received!
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