One of the better things to happen in the past year for my wife and me has been the relocation of our local grocery store, the Seward Coop. Not only is it only three blocks from us now; it’s also twice as big, with amazing all-Minnesota meat counter (with the best hand made sausages in the city), a great deli, amazing selections of the whole world of organic and sustainable food. Basically it’s everything we want in a place to buy our food.

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.

I spent some time last week with Jenny and Seth Nelson, realtors and developers here in Minneapolis, collaborating on some portraits for their promotional materials. They wanted to add a little bit of edge to the shots to appeal to a younger crowd, and here’s a sampling of what we came up with.

I’ve always loved raw loft spaces: the high ceilings, the natural light, the the openness. Pretty much every time I mow the lawn the fantasy of a loft condo comes back and I have to find a way to beat it back.

Valcucine is a beautiful line of high end Italian cabinetry, with clean modern lines that fit the loft aesthetic perfectly; they’re designed with the European living space in mind, where efficient use of small spaces (compared to the usual American house, that is) is a requirement. But unlike certain other European furniture makers (cough cough IKEA cough cough), Valcucine’s stuff is built to last, with an eye towards sustainability and nontoxic production methods.

My writer friends from the Sample Circuit and I visited the Valcucine showroom last week to do an advertorial showcase piece. Valcucine corporate has some beautiful photos of the actual product, so we decided to focus on the shopping experience.

Despite what my lack of postings the past couple weeks may suggest, I’ve been pretty busy, mostly with business-y things other than taking pictures. (Although I am doing some shooting for a story for the Carleton College Voice, among other little projects; just can’t post anything from the set until it’s published.)

Mostly I’ve been enmeshed in various marketing stuff. Moving my portfolio from agency to agency, sometimes talking to the art buyers, sometimes just leaving it to its own fate for a day or two on a conference table. Launching a Facebook ad campaign for my wedding business. Poking around Twitter. Doing a bunch of work in an effort to increase my Google page rank and tweak my site for better search engine optimization.

It’s all important stuff, and for all you small business types, you know how it is trying to drive business: completely emorphous, seemingly random, and demanding a skill set that is entirely separate from what drew you to go in to business in the first place.

So you end up becoming an expert (or at least picking up just enough knowledge to be dangerous) in all sorts of stuff that you never expected – or wanted – to know anything about. For me that’s my budding understanding of how Google ranks pages. I’m lucky to be part of an industry that does a great job of information sharing, through groups like the American Society of Media Photographers, and businesses like PhotoShelter, and the heart of the photo blog community that I’ve come to know (Chase Jarvis, Strobist, APhotoEditor to name my favorite few), all of whom have been hammering away for months on the ever-growing importance of good organic Google search results for your site. Here’s the high level view of what I’ve learned so far, and have been trying to implement wherever I can:

• Using the keywords that you want people to find you by in your page titles is important, and the order of your words makes a difference. For example, “Chris Bohnhoff Editorial Photographer in Minneapolis” isn’t as good as “Minneapolis Editorial Photographer Chris Bohnhoff”. A little counter intuitive, but that’s what they say.
• Packing keywords in to the meta:keywords and meta:description fields in the head section of your html code makes a small difference, but should still be done.
• Also including keywords in photo captions, file names, and alt text fields is key.

Then there are incoming links, which apparently is 60-70% of what makes up search ranking. That means getting yourself listed in reputable online directories, blogging, commenting on others’ blogs, tweeting, being active in as many online communities as possible. (I’ve almost convinced my wife that reading blogs counts as work, but she hasn’t completely bought in yet.)

I’ve only begun this process, and I’ve got a long way to go, but that’s the deal: continuous improvement. What’s interesting to me is how Google has codified the importance of interconnectedness in setting the importance of links so high. To be a success in Google’s world you have to convince people that you have content worth linking to. Sure, you can pay to include yourself in a fake community. Or you can put in the time to forge actual connections with people online. Weird.

Like I said, I’m early in the process, so leave a comment and correct me if I’m off base, or if you have anything to add on the topics of online marketing, the experience of being a wearer of many unexpected hats, whatever. And next time I’ll get back to the pictures. . .

The best thing about photographing food is that sometimes you get to eat it when you’re done. But that is not, in fact, the only good thing.

A lot of what I do is story telling through environment: somewhere in the frame is a person, and all around that person is their world. I may tweak things a little, but I value photographing people’s lives as I find them; I generally don’t see it as my job to create an idealized version of a person. I think it’s much more fun, and more effective, to reflect as much reality as possible. That’s where I feel like I bring the most value as a photographer. But I digress. . .

Food pictures make you look a little more closely at the things in a very small area. Which is fun, because you get to see how much attention, expertise, and care are packed in to a piece of food. And for the food maker, the stuff on the plate is a small bite of their life. That’s what I was thinking about photographing the process of making the delicious little creations cranked out at BT McElrath Chocolatier last week.

Chocolate truffles waiting to be packaged

Chocolate bars in their molds

Artwork getting applied to truffles

Truffles coming off the line

Some of BT McElrath's signature pieces

More at chrisbohnhoff.com