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.

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.

Enjoy!

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?

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.

Which is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be working with them on their imagery – you can see the first newsletter I shot for them in PDF form here. The other reasons to be excited: great people who are fully willing to collaborate on the vision of a story, a mission that I wholeheartedly believe in right in my backyard, and amazing layout and branding provided by Spunk Design Machine.

Our first project was a backyard barbecue to highlight the August Eat Local promotion.

For you photog-types out there, a note on the lighting. I was absolutely excited about the evening sun blaring in from behind, but using only natural light would either have blown out the background and washed out the vivid color on the table, or left everything not the sky way under-exposed. So I set my base exposure to where I wanted the background to be, then I set two speedlights back from the near corners of the table to provide fill. The sweet spot was an exposure that gave highlights from the strong backlighting, with just enough fill to give detail and max color on the table and on peoples’ faces. The two speedlights were set to identical power, providing an even field of light over the table and subjects, giving me the ability to change my angle and not have to worry about resetting the lights. Then I could concentrate on composition and directing the subjects.

Art Buddies Spring 2009 – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

The basic Art Buddies structure is that people from the creative industry sign up and get paired with a third, fourth, or fifth grader at Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis. Over the course of six weeks you and your buddy have an assignment to work on – ours was putting together a costume depicting the child as ‘ruler of the world.’ But the emphasis is on hanging out and just being with your buddy, not so much on the end product (although there is a parade during the last meeting and a chance to show off a little bit).

I don’t have kids of my own, and my friends’ kids that I spend time with are generally in the 1-4 year old range, so this has really been my first one-on-one experience with a 9-year-old. And as week one started, and kids and adult buddies were getting paired up, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. My buddy is a back of the line, messing around with the other back of the line boys kind of boy, so I had to wait through almost everyone before he made his way over to my table. And there was very little sign of interest as I introduced myself and our assignment, as the Art Buddies organizers guided us to do. We had been encouraged to bring some kind of tools or examples of the work we do in our creative careers, and I had brought my portfolio, and my tripod, and my camera. I asked if my buddy if he wanted to check those things out. Not really. But he was excited to check out the art supplies.

Art Buddies may kid its volunteers in to thinking that they are a big draw for these kids, but on that first Thursday afternoon I saw the truth: the real draw was free reign over a double-sized classroom chock full of bins and bins of art supplies. Fabric, yarn, all manor of little shiny things, hot glue guns, cardboard. . . the possibilities were staggering. And my buddy (with me trailing behind) spent most of that first hour digging through bins and coming back to our table with armfuls of stuff. He had no idea what his costume was going to be, and he didn’t especially want to talk about it, or about any of the other suggested topics, like what makes a good leader. But processing all the textures, colors, and possibilities was exactly what he wanted to do. So that’s what we did.

I learned a few things over the next five weeks with my buddy.

• Not all 9 year old boys are driven to make everything they touch in to some kind of weapon.
• Man, do the kids love them some hot glue guns.
• I can’t tell you the name of the movie or of the actor, but apparently I look like the bad guy killer in some movie that my buddy watched. . . all I can tell you is that it was in some apartment, and the character he said I looked like got mad and killed the landlord, then I killed my girlfriend, but I didn’t really love her, but then the girl that I really loved ended up killing me. Or something like that.
• I like 9 year olds. Even when all signs point to complete zoning out or messing around, they’re processing and figuring stuff out. It’s fun to watch that process and be amazed by what they can do.

As the weeks progressed, It did end up seeming like my  buddy liked hanging out with me. The evidence? We made each other cards after the parade on week six, and his said, “Thanks for being the best art buddy ever.”

Fun additional note: a reporter from the Star Tribune filed this story from our Art Buddies class – my buddy and I are even quoted (even though they spelled my name wrong)!

Each year a group of SLPP volunteers return to the villages to meet with residents and work together to improve their quality of life. This year’s trip is a little different: cell phone towers have gone up very close to the villages, making live blog posts possible. I’d encourage anyone to check out the SLPP blog, in particular this week while they’re in the villages, for an unfiltered sense of what it’s like to visit one of the poorest nations in the world: a complicated, but entirely enriching, experience for us members of the ‘first world.’

If you’re interested in seeing my take on Sierra Leone, please visit my Sierra Leone gallery. Also, I have a traveling exhibition of portraits from the trip entitled Made Real: Portraits from Sierra Leone that can be viewed and purchased online. All proceeds directly benefit the Sierra Leone Plymouth Partnership.

Ahhhhhh Spring.

More at chrisbohnhoff.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Having none of my own, however, puts me at a disadvantage from time to time.

I’ve started doing some work with the Plymouth Neighborhood Foundation, a great group that works on a number of fronts within the broad category of creating low income housing opportunities. Last week I visited two of the properties they manage to take a couple portraits, one of which was a family portrait: a Somali woman, her 18 month old son, and her 5 month old daughter.

Hawa and her kids

Rapport with my subject is absolutely the most important thing in my portrait work. If there’s no trust or element of connection between me and the people I’m shooting, the photos end up bland and uninspired, no matter how interesting the composition or how intricate the lighting. But also, that connection is why I’m a photographer. How many jobs are there where you can just enter the home of complete strangers and get a glimpse of their life? This kind of shoot is exactly why I love my job.

But back to rapport. When there are kids in a shoot, they are the wellspring of all rapport: if you get them on your side, the adults will be with you. If you lose them, the adults will be spending all their energy getting the kids in the game and none of their energy making some kind of connection with the camera. So we walk in to the apartment, and the son, Aris, has this look like, Who are you and why are you in my house? So I get to work. I make eye contact, get the smiles going. As I start opening my light cases and camera bag I make faces to him that say, Ooh, what’s this great stuff? You wanna look? And that’s when the control slips from my hands, about 48 seconds in to the shoot.

Turns out that Aris is at the exact age where everything he does is a search for the edges – is standing on the couch going to get him yelled at? How about pulling his sister’s hair? (Not that these things happened; they’re just examples.) If you’ve ever been around toddlers you know the button pushing I’m talking about. So as soon as I open my light case, I’ve way oversold how interested Aris needs to be about what’s going on; he’s very quickly all over everything, pulling out cords, trying to actually *jump* on my camera bag, wanting to open everything.

As I’m putting these very breakable and expensive electronic lights up on light stands around the room, I realize the scope of the tactical error I’ve made. Aris is totally sold on how fun this stuff is, and what would be really fun would be to yank it all down and see what happens when it hits the floor. So he’s toddling from light to light, making like he’s preparing to pull. Luckily, part of what he’s doing is testing Hawa, so as he does these things he looks over at her and at me as owner of these great toys, to gauge our reactions. We have time to lunge over and stop him before he does any damage.

Meanwhile, between lungings, I’m metering the light, composing the shot, trying to get a word with Hawa. It’s kind of lunacy, but the shot comes together and it’s time to get the family sitting on the couch together. So Hawa drags Aris away from the lights and onto the couch and I get a couple shots before Aris squirms away. I play goalie and protect the gear. Hawa re-apprehends Aris. We get a couple more shots.

And so on.

Luckily, Hawa’s daughter was just stoic. I can’t remember her name, which is fairly fitting: you always remember the troublemaker more than the good kid (spoken by a classic good first child). I was able to get 15 or so shots before our demands to stay on the couch transformed Aris’ fun into definitely not fun, rendering him pretty much unphotogenic for the purposes of a photo shoot meant to show happy apartment residents. We called it a wrap, and I have never packed gear so quickly.

More work at chrisbohnhoff.com.