Photography challenges me everytime I pick up the camera – challenges me into not going into too much detail. That less is more. And yet I am still learning. Will never stop learning.... I still take what seems thousands of photographs each time I shoot. Still seem to be ladening my shots with flowers, and then finding that the best shots, the most beautiful shots, are those without all the fluff. Uncluttered, as with life itself. I don’t think I’ll ever stop trying to achieve this art of balance. I find it applies to everything I do – recipe development, food styling, photography, to just being me. My goal you could say, the beauty of simple.
As I am putting together todays post, I’m reflecting on the above musings I wrote a couple of weeks back. Since then something truly exciting has happened. I attended a weeks long intensive photography course at Kingsize studios! To say I learned a lot would be a huge understatement! Thank you so much to Luke, Andre, Adam, Fraser and Bob for helping me through this. Because of this week, I am a little behind in editing my recipes, (there was a lot of food preparation!) so I would like to share snippets of the photos that I took. I hope you like them and I promise to get these recipes to you eventually!!
I am inspired by nature, the seasons and simple organic styling – my goal is that this is reflected in my photographs. Right now it is late summer in Auckland and we have an abundance of stone fruit. Apples and pears have also resurrected again, and these are the muses for the two carpaccios. It is also the season for passionfruit and this year I have discovered a soft spot for lemongrass – so a white chocolate and lemongrass cheesecake with passionfruit topping became of that. Chocolate ganache… not so seasonal, but do you need an excuse for chocolate? A lot of people liked this on social media at least! The beet salad with vegan 'goat' cheese, apple, dijon and honey cashew dressing is my 'Sweden' salad (although not particularly Nordic in terms of flavour). It is dear to my heart as it is the salad that seemed to be in almost every cafe when we first moved to Stockholm and I believe it was influential in kindling my love of plant based food.
I come up with a vision of doing a ‘plant food’ series in colours (green, yellow and red), represented by the colours of some of my plant based nut milk recipes (which I'll be putting on the blog). These shoots were incredibly fun but tricky given my camera wasn’t tethered! I recently went back to the studio and shot a “purple” scene however whether that gets shown is yet to be decided – the kumara and eggplant styling looks hmmm… a little rude to say the least =)
All my recipes are 100% raw and vegan with the exception of manuka honey which was used as a sweeter in the chocolate ganache and dijon and honey cashew dressing (beet salad). You'll also notice that the white backgrounds in my pictures can tend to differ - this is something I am learning and find incredibly difficult! How unexciting would life be though, if everything was easy =)
I'd love for some comments and feedback so don't hold back! Aimee xo
