One Girl Cookies Sign

One Girl Cookies is a homey bakery on Dean Street that has a simple understated sign hanging outside that only says “cookies.” Inside is more like what you’d expect to find in a small town, not Brooklyn, there’s even a family tree of the owners, Dawn and Dave, hanging on one of the walls. It’s also much bigger than it looks. Kind of like the Tardis from Doctor Who.

I’ve been looking for a place to start shooting for my editorial portfolio and One Girl was perfect. Thankfully, Dawn and Dave welcomed the idea of letting me wander around the shop for a few hours unattended.

No, I didn’t steal anything.

One Girl Cookies - the store, the seating area, cookies and cupcakes

2:02PM, 12/28/2009 - Celebration Onion 2010

I bought a dozen onions and brought them into the studio for the usual shoot ‘em and eat ‘em routine. One by one I placed them on set and, one by one, little personalities revealed themselves. These are the year-end onions, the ones that aren’t in the best of shape, but are still worth eating. No longer are the stems green and bright, they’re brown and look more like the ones in the supermarket than the greenmarket, shipped from far away and weeks or months old.

Am I deluded? Onions? Little personalities? Four years of this and still thinking there are little people in there somewhere. Should I make a metaphorical reference to the year passing as layers of an onion and go cliché on everyone?

Too late.

I pay homage to 2009 with this celebration onion. I will cut into it with sharp abandon, and with tears in my eyes, throw the thin slices into a hot frying pan drizzled with sesame oil, sizzling and transforming itself into something sweet, fragrant and appealing. Oh, how 2010 should be so transformed from 2009.

Happy New Year.

10:12AM, 12/14/2009 Rows of Romanesco Broccoli

Swaying like the tops of pine trees blowing in the wind, these end of season romanesco broccoli are actually an edible flower in the Brassica oleracea family (cauliflower, not broccoli!).

Now that the clocks have been set back, I don’t have to get up quite as early to capture the more dramatic early morning light (It’s not like I’ve ever actually gotten up early to shoot these). People keep asking me if I light or arrange the Union Square, Shooting from the Hip photos. The answer is always no. The light and styling of the subject just happen to be that way when I capture the image.

P.S. All my friends have commented that, “Hey, they look like Xmas trees.” Silly me.

Anthropomorphic Celeriac

I don’t do anything, really. I don’t. I go to the market. I see something interesting. I shoot it. I eat it (this week it was in my salads). I rarely see the “anthro” part until after I’ve finished shooting and have time to review the captures. It’s the limbo of the background isolating the food. We get to study it with no distractions and that’s when it takes on a life of its own.

So why do we see it this way? I suspect that this is just the human brain still relating to the world it lives in the same way it did 50,000 years ago. As early modern humans evolved and needed to explain the world around them and, while in the process of inventing reasons for why things happen like day and night or lightning, did they also look at their relationship with food and give human attributes to those things that abstractly had hair, eyes, hands, etc., as they did with clouds? I think so (but I haven’t done my research here). Somehow this must be embedded in our genes just like smiling.

11/6/2009 Brussels Sprouts - Belting out a tune (probably a show tune at that)

Ethel Merman screen capture from YouTube

Standing over three feet tall and looking like Ethel Merman belting out, “No Business Like Show Business,” this stalk had over 70 Sprouts clinging to it. And the leaves at the top? Well that’s just a giant Brussels Sprout, kinda like a head of cabbage, really. And those leaves, they’re about 14 inches across. Huge.

I know a lot of folks hate these, and I really don’t understand why. Sprouts sliced in half and sautéed in olive oil for a few minutes and dusted with pepper and a twist of freshly ground sea salt makes this a wonderful side dish with pasta.

Brussels Sprouts Spine

As a side note, PJ, my studio mate, came in and suggested this would look like a spine if I cut the head off, which I did and, sure enough, it looked like a curved scoliosis spine. But after spending all that time with this stalk on set, I had grown used to that big head of leaves and I couldn’t help but feel it looked a little anemic without it.

BTW, trying to lay out multiple images in WordPress is challenging. There’s not a lot of room for design.

8:43AM, 10/28/2009 Radishes and Carrots

Another shot from last week’s rainy Wednesday.

Inside spread of D.A.Wagner's work from Freelance Portfolio Magazine

Yesterday afternoon, Greg Welch called me regarding a submission I made to his, about-to-be-launched, Freelance Portfolio Magazine, scheduled for December. He’d taken a look at the blog and felt there was something compelling about my comparisons of Mandelbrot’s fractals, NASA satellite imagery and my photographs of food. It struck a chord and we chatted a while about my past history with computers and special effects and, instead of my original submission, he asked to publish the images from the post. He mentioned that the launch was pushed up and he expected to put it up by today.

And he did. With my images included. I love the way it looks and Greg got me to thinking again about those visual relationships that somehow connect the very small to the very large. I spent most of my morning cruising through CERN, Fermilab and NASA, looking for more ways that that happens. Look for them in upcoming posts.

Thanks, Greg.

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn and caldron bubble.

A Chinese lady came up to me in the Union Square market last Monday morning, pointed down and asked, in broken English, how much? I don’t have a clue what gave her the idea I worked at this particular kiosk at the market, but it gave me pause to look down at a group of pumpkins with long, wild stems, as if they had been torn off the vine instead of cut. No prices.

Now, I wanted to know, too. How much? They were two bucks apiece. I took the three most interesting stems (almost more important than the pumpkins themselves) and bagged them so the stems didn’t break on the way back to the studio. Then, I stopped and told the lady how much they were, but she looked at me in a funny kind of way – I don’t think she understood me or, maybe she’d already gotten over her pumpkin jones.

Vicki says these pumpkins remind her of Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth.

A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder. (Shakespeare)

Happy Halloween. (Not Shakespeare )

9:08AM, 10/14/2009 End of Season Corn

There have been too many attempts shooting corn with nothing to show. Husks are just not an easy subject. But someone pulled the husk back on this one, revealing the corn and leaving it on top of the heap in the early morning light, which moved across the kernels in a hurry.  It took less than 60 seconds before the light moved off that perfect spot. Three shots. That’s all I had time for.

Then, the light was gone.

9:04AM 10/21/09, French Breakfast Radishes in Union Square Market

Some things look completely different from different angles. You wouldn’t expect that from French breakfast radishes since they’re more or less symmetrical and, unless you’re a radish, can tell the difference. So, here are two shots, taken less than two minutes apart. Diffused sunlight through the vendor’s white tent fabric and shot from this camera angle (Originally shot from the side and flipped 90º), this capture feels soft and nurturing.

This shot (below), however, I captured from the top of the stack (I flipped this upside down – clever me) and the radishes cast a shadow on themselves. A totally different feeling: dramatic, almost threatening in a scary movie kind of way. Alien. I like the top shot for the one radish rising about the crowd. I like the bottom shot for the drama of the tangled white roots rising against the receding shadow and gray pavement of Union Square.

9:06AM, 10/21/2009 French Breakfast Radishes Alternate in Union Square Market

Why so different? It must be the light. Or maybe it’s the camera angle. Then again, if I’d not turned them, would they have been as visually compelling? Maybe not, as I passed these over at least three times in my editing before taking on a different perspective. Simply shooting from the hip is not always enough to get to an interesting shot.

Sometimes you have to stand on your head (metaphorically) to make things interesting.