I love growing my own vegetables. There is something so satisfying about picking them in your backyard bringing them in and serving them. Maybe it's the feeling that you did it all yourself, that you didn't have to rely on a supermarket or your car to get them, maybe it's that the vegetables are all natural and you know it, maybe, it's because it just tastes better. 

We had a beautiful garden before we began contstruction on the addtion to our house. It was part of the original farm land in the back yard when we moved in it was completely over grown and we cleaned it all out and had a fantastic garden for years. It was buried during construction so I am building a new one..from scratch so to speak. Over the last year I put down plywood over a large area in the back fields to kill the grass. I pulled it up a week or so ago and began the building phase.

I need to get a fence up this weekend and some plants in the ground soon! My friend Chef Jeff Fournier will be helping me along the way and sharing some recipe's for locally grown produce.

And then I pulled the boards and strated clearing the dead grass

A few years back I set out to illustrate the concept of being "out of control". I created an image of a woman surrounded by the total chaos of her 5 children (with another on the way). We had so much fun shooting it and almost every female art director with children of her own would say "that's my life!". Having kids of my own and being completely type A, it's an image near and dear to my heart.  I have always loved the conversations it incites.

As a comercial photographer, the reach of the images I create is usually limited to the media buy of specific clients and to those potential clients reviewing my work online or in private meetings with my rep, Jenna. It's not usually like the "Ultimate Dog Tease," with millions of hits on YouTube...Until last week when we got a front row seat watching this "Out of Control" image take off on a ride around the internet.

It started with a friend of Jenna's who emailed her that she saw the picture on a blog. Then, Sunday, night another woman reposted the image on her facebook page. By Tuesday it had received 40,516 likes, 7,065 comments, and been shared 27,844 times. It was, at first, really exciting for us to witness. We actually watched as, every couple of minutes, people were posting comments like these:

It was all very cool and gratifying to watch, particularly in real time, until we realized that there was no credit on the image, no reference to us whatsoever. All those people, downloading to their desktops, sending it to friends and simply loving this image that took so much time and effort to produce and no one was the wiser that we created it (Speaking of credit: many thanks to Tui Stark for the fabulous prop styling, Erin Charest for the awesome wardrobe and Cynthia Murphy for the spectacular hair and make-up!).

What ensued was an all day effort, on Jenna's part, to get credit for the image and to harness some traffic back to our website. Unbelievably, it was very difficult...We understand that not everyone has money for imagery they are using and that there are even people in the world that feel they shouldn't have to pay for any of it, regardless. But, that's a whole other conversation. Giving credit is easy, however, and with a small amount of effort you can usually find out where the image came from (try a site like Tineye.com to start). 

This conversation about the internet and copyright has been going on since the begining of the world wide web and since I am sure you have heard the arguments over and over, I'm not going to get into that here. What I would like to point out, though, is how valuable that credit can be to any artist. In the end, Jenna was able to get that credit for me as well as links back to our facebook page and heathrobbins.com. As a result of this post we received 760 additional visitors to our website and our facebook "likes" were up 46%. That kind of attention and the possible leads can be just as valuable as financial compensation.  So, in this case, it all worked out and we're happy so much excitement was stirred up on facebook....and that 40,000 people like the image as much as we do!

 Here is the image. Feel free to re-post it... just make sure my name is on it :)

I recently had the opportunity to shoot with Art Director Claudia Catalano-we've been talking about working together for more than 5 years! Claudia came to us with a very cool project; Shooting lifestyle images for professional cutlery manufacturer, Dexter-Russell, images that will ultimately be wrapped around an RV. We needed a working kitchen with lots of stainless steel and lots of space to move around.  The perfect place for that was, as always, the Manitowoc test kitchen in Tampa, FL. I had the added bonus of seeing Caitlin Rodgers again!

Working with Calaudia, Carol and Peter at Catalano Design and with Jim Bellerose from Dexter Russel was terrific and I can't wait to see the RV completed this spring. (check back for another blog posting) It will be outfitted inside with a working kitchen and touring the country visiting culinary schools. Should be in the Boston area in June.

We had to make it look like a the narrow kitchen that you will find in the RV so we made a wall out of stainless steel and used baking sheets to keep it from bending when we held it up.

The chefs taking a break

Here is one of the final images

Check out our recent trip to Tampa where we photographed for Manitowoc Food Services!

We had two more days with BJ's this week for spring shoots. I love creating sets that look real and Verne Cordova is the master of doing just that. Here is a peak at the other two shoots we completed.

We had nearly 3 tons of patio stone and and we still had to move it around to create the shot.

The main shot

Moving the stone for the left side

Another look

and moving it again for the umbrella and the back

The last day was on a porch

It was a little more relaxing without all the stone to move

Except for Verne...