An Afternoon With Viv and Lara

I feel so lucky to be living in Seattle at this time in my life.  It is a wonderful city full of amazing and creative people and places.  About a year ago, I listened to my heart and turned my focus to food.  Not just eating food, but creating food, sharing food, talking about food, blogging about food, dreaming about food.  I will admit it right here: my name is Jeanne and I am a foodie.  I know that the word “foodie” is looked down upon in certain circles, but I embrace it.  I love this new world I have entered.  And it turns out that I am in the perfect city for food lovers!  We food-lovers in Seattle have it all–terrific restaurants, amazing farmers markets, food writers and readers everywhere, events to attend just about every day or night.  It’s wonderful.

As I’ve written in previous posts, our food-loving community is very convivial.  A big part of why I love being in this food-oriented world is the opportunity to meet and hang out with other like-minded folks.  Other people for whom getting together and talking about their favorite issue of Gourmet magazine (RIP), or who swoon over the homemade bacon made by a friend is their idea of a good time.  Another thing we do is photograph food.  It’s kind of an obsession.  One day on Twitter, someone made a joke that their camera battery was dead, so there was no sense in making dinner.  It’s kind of true–we food bloggers love to take pictures of our food and part of our enjoyment of it is to document it.  Some of us do this with more creativity and art than others.  I fall into the “others” camp.  I am fairly hopeless at taking masterful photos, but I’ve tried over the past year to make sure the photos on this blog are no longer embarrassing.  I hope I’ve succeeded…

But, there are many people in my food-lover community who take amazing photos for themselves, for cookbooks, and for their blogs.  One of these people is my pal, Viv, who blogs at Seattle Bon Vivant.  Viv just finished doing the photography for the new cookbook by our mutual friend, Kim O’Donnel, The Meat Lovers Meatless Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes Carnivores Will Devour.  Her photos are gorgeous–wait until you see them!  I am so excited for her!

One thing Viv loves to do is gather like-minded people together and hang out with each other.  Or learn with and from each other.  In December she arranged for the amazing Penny de los Santos, who does photography for Saveur magazine, to come to Seattle to teach a food photography workshop at a local (and terrific) restaurant, Spring Hill.  Next week, she is bringing in Helene to Seattle to teach 2 workshops–1 on food photography and 1 on making macarons (yum).

A couple of weeks ago, Viv arranged for one of our local food photographers and cookbook writer, Lara Ferroni, to teach a food photography workshop.  I offered to hang out and help Viv do the behind-the-scenes things so she could take advantage of what Lara was teaching.  It was such a wonderful day and Lara is a talented, terrific, kind, and generous teacher.

Our pal Luuvu made a wonderful video of the day.  It is short and elegant.  It is such lovely video–and it captures the spirit of the day, which was, by turns, intense, creative, fun, quiet, convivial.  Check it out:

Afternoon w/ Lara – Food Photography Workshop from LuuvuH on Vimeo.