January and February. A few delays but made some progress. Can actually see a little light at the end of the tunnel. They are doing beautiful work but it's is moving very, very slowly and that's really not my speed in life: picture type A individual tapping his foot as he watches the progress.

I recently had the pleasure of working with Rachel Greenstein at Warner Communications shooting Olivia's Organic's. They have various lettuce mixes and we needed to shoot their product on the shelf in-store as well as plated in salads back at the studio.

They wanted everything to feel real and natural so I opted for using natural light for the salads and even went that route in the store. I mention it, because I hear a lot of people asking whether using natural light is easier and I find it's just the opposite. You have to constantly move as the light moves, deal with clouds and color temperature changes, highlights, shadows and use tons of reflectors to achieve the look you like. Don't get me wrong I love using natural light and do it quite often but it's very different than setting up lights so that nothing changes as you shoot... perhaps that's why I like it.

We shot natural light in the store because we pretty much didn't have any other option. The store was open, there wasn't much room (or much time) and given all the plastic on the product the highlights were going to be an issue. They also wanted to see the lettuce in the packaging so given these constraints we used the set up below. We decided to cut down the light instead of adding it. Mike drew up a diagram so you could see where we were:

It was really funny because we had at least half a dozen women who were shopping, come over and try to take the packages as we were setting them up on the shelves (The store had actually sold out the night before so we used all the product Rachel brought for the salads). This was particularly comical because they had to squeeze their way in as we were setting up.

This was what we ended up with:

Then it was back to the studio where Catrine was waiting to style. We used all the surfaces we had in the studio that had an earthy natural feel. Here are some of the shots we took:

Like I said...it started to snow. the house was far from weather tight. we could have built snowmen indoors. But they kept building in frigid temperatures and a fair amount of snow over December and January. They even started the fireplace which for us was very exciting to see something new being built.

Our dining room table is supposed to be in that spot

At least the workers had a sense of humor about it

The roof over the master bath still didn't work so we brought in Bob Escher...if you ever need an architect call us - he's very talented and a pleasure to work with.

They sealed everything they could up

They had to reframe around the fireplace as they were building it

yeah, that looks safe....

Loved the mason's old tools

This will now get covered in fieldstone, one of these days...

Here's a closer look at our shoot with Source Marketing for French's. Many thanks to Kelly Upson for her fantastic food styling and Verne Cordova for his always perfect wardrobe and prop selections!

We had a two day shoot with Source Marketing for French's last week. On one of the afternoons our second assistant Chris set up the Nikon to record the afternoon. It was pretty cool and fun to see what everyone did throughout the day in front of the camera.