One of the things I love about professional chefs is that they’re often up for an adventure. Take Hakan Lundberg, Chef de Cuisine at Cosmos Restaurant in Minneapolis. When I first approached him a couple months ago about helping me put together a food photo shoot on top of a frozen lake, he put up about ten seconds of indecision, then jumped squarely on board. I did luck out a little bit, though; his first ice fishing experience happened after I made the request. If things had happened the other way around, I’m not so sure I would’ve got the same answer.

Ice Fishing Gourmet – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

This shoot definitely had more variables to contend with than installment one of the Worldly Gourmet series last summer with Asher Miller. Variable number one goes by the name Lake Minnetonka. I went out to scout the shoot location a week prior to our chosen date, and temps had been in the upper 30s for several days. The foot of snow sitting on top of the ice had been turned to slushy puddles. Not really what I wanted to see. Then a good news/bad news kind of thing happened: first, a big cold snap froze the puddles, which was great. Not so great was the 14 inches of snow that came a couple days before the shoot, making travel across the lake much more tricky.

A very busy week leading up to the shoot meant that dialing in the location would have to happen the morning of the shoot, which certainly provided a couple anxious moments (that’s code for nearly driving in to the lake, then getting stuck for 15 minutes), but in the end we found a great spot and hit our schedule perfectly. Hooray for local knowledge, trusty assistants capable of taking turns at pushing a stuck vehicle, Google Maps, fallback options, and fallback fallback options!

Once we got to our spot, a magical thing happened that I find often happens when it’s time to take photos: the thick gray clouds parted, the wind died down, and the weather turned about as nice as you could expect on a late-February day in Minnesota. Hakan’s son Isaac had a great time ice fishing (although the highlight of his day seemed to be when the fish heads were removed – he kept asking if it was time, and when it finally was, he ran around screaming, TIME TO CUT THE FISH HEADS! TIME TO CUT THE FISH HEADS! Clearly the son of a chef – plus, check out the photo of him cutting carrots), and we did exactly what we had set out to do: have a great time, and take some fun quirky photos.

Much-deserved thanks to my collaborators, Food Stylist Rachel Sherwood, Prop and Wardrobe Stylist Jenny Jenkins, and Photo Assistant Nate Ryan. And of course, thanks to Hakan Lundberg, a true culinary artist, for being so giving with his time and talents. Check out his Cosmos Kitchen blog for the latest in his professional world, or, even better, stop by Cosmos to sample some of the most creative, beautiful plates in Minneapolis.

Lastly, if you’d like to see a couple behind-the-scenes shots from the day, c’mon over to my Facebook Page for the rest of the story.

There’s a stereotype out there that kids don’t like vegetables. But why? A lot of veggies would seem to make them right up kids’ alley: they’re colorful, sometimes a little dirty, often sweet, with great textures that make them irresistible to touch. These are the very things that a Minneapolis organization called Midwest Food Connection emphasizes to help teach kids the ABCs of food. I had the pleasure of tagging along with two of their instructors earlier this week to photograph a few classes in action.

Midwest Food Connection instructors visit Twin Cities classrooms throughout the year. What they bring is raw food that kids can touch, smell, and taste. They tell stories about how root cellars were the grocery stores 100 years ago, and explain things like how rolled oats are made. Meanwhile the instructors use the oldest trick in the book to gain attention: free food. Like a kale, rutabaga, and leek stew. The leek smelled amazing as it simmered throughout the class, and was a huge hit when it was time to dig in.

Given how complex the American food market has become over the past half century, and how food choices are being linked to an ever-growing list of diseases, it’s great that organizations like Midwest Food Connection are stepping in to the void to get our children thinking about food early. So often the connection between raw ingredients and finished ‘food product’ are entirely lost; only through education and hands-on exposure to real food will we as a society retain our food values. I’m so happy to be able to help them tell their story.

Yesterday some very good friends of mine let me borrow their car. With their kids in it. Then we had a little snack time photo shoot with some of the girls’ favorite drive time snacks: Annie’s Bunny Crackers, and grapes. As you can see from the photos here, the bunny crackers were the clear winner.

Enjoy!

Yesterday I got my copy of the lastest Seward Coop Sprout! magazine in the mail, which means I can show you some photos that I took not too long ago. Pretty fun stuff – over the fall and winter most of the work I did for the coop was in the store, but they got me out in the neighborhood for some really fun stories. Namely,

The cover story was shot at the Seward Child Care Center. They’ve received a neighborhood grant from the coop to teach their kids about food. One of the teaching tools is a compost bucket, which they keep underneath the fish tank. They feed it their lunch scraps, and leaves, and keep it watered, checking in with the worms and keeping ‘em happy. If there’s one thing you want it’s happy worms. Ask any of these kids, they’ll tell you the same thing.

Next up was a house remodeled to Gold LEED certification a couple years ago – amazing and very personal in the way they used materials that in most remodel projects would’ve been chucked in the dumpster, to make a super livable and beautiful new home. Definitely check out the magazine for the whole story on this staircase and all the other sustainable touches. Pretty inspiring.

Lastly, we’re entering the inaugural year of Growing Lots, a new farm being created right on top of an old parking lot. It will operate on the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, which is a fairly cutting-edge idea for an urban core area not on one of the coasts. I got to photograph the team at Seward Redesign, an incredibly innovative real estate development firm who is sponsoring the project (among the many projects they’ve got going, all enhancing sustainability and livability in the Seward neighborhood).

How great a client is the Seward Coop, sending me to meet all these amazing folks?

For the latest cover of Seward Coop’s Sprout! magazine we did a faux apple harvest. Faux because of the fact that our location – a small apple stand at the Dowling Urban Environmental School – had plenty of apples, they were just rotting under our feet, not actually on the trees. But when you’re trying to illustrate the fall harvest, and you’re about a month too late to harvest (and it’s about 80 degrees, but when the issue comes out it’ll be 50), what are you gonna do? You’re gonna fake it, that’s what.

Photographing kids is always an attempt to organize sheer chaos, but these guys did a pretty great job pretending to be cold and pick pretend apples (they did actually eat the apples – that wasn’t a problem).

For those of you photo lighting aficionados out there, an explanation of the first shot above. As you can see in the first shot, the sun was pretty low in the sky when we did the shoot. I knew that there was going to be some action going on, and that it would need to be frozen for the main shot of the family at least. Given that the natural light was fading, and we were in and out of dappled sunlight, I knew there would be some lighting happening.

I love using the sun as a backlight – even putting the sun in the frame to get the nice rings of color – then pumping something in as a key light in front, so that’s what we did here. I had my assistant TJ climb a tree camera right and direct a Quantum Q-Flash towards the family. When combining ambient and strobe lights the main question is what exposure value do you want to give the background in relation to the subject, being lit by the strobe? I really wanted a bright background to give the scene as much warmth as possible, so I adjusted my exposure to give the trees in the background plenty of detail, and to blow out the highlights. Then I adjusted the Quantum to give a good exposure on our family, and blasted away.

First time I’ve ever asked an assistant to climb a tree for me. . . hopefully it won’t be the last.