Rob Lawler and Truffle Table { Hudson Valley Headshot Photographer }
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to go shoot some food shots for Truffle Table here in Hudson Valley. It’s a great little wine and cheese restaurant. They have a wide selection of wines, and then they have this completely fantastic selection of cheeses. I shouldn’t say that’s all they have, because in reality they have a ton of other items on their menu, which are all delicious.
First up is the headshot, which again, no surprise is one of my favorite shots of the day. After working with Rob all day, I really wanted to get a portrait of him. I really liked his character. He was humble, nice, and passionate about the food he was serving. I always love watching people work when they real
ly have a passion for what they’re working on. For the headshot we simply used window light, and then I put a reflector on the shadow side to bring in just a bit of light. The light kept going in and out of the clouds by the time we shot this, so it was tricky to nail the eposure over the 10 minutes when we were shooting his portrait. I sure did like how it turned out. The post work on it was pretty minimal, just some color toning, and then a bit of retouching to clean things up. For the most part on these shots though I like to leave the person, their shape, and skin alone. I always hate seeing portraits like this, and you can tell they were photoshopped.
Not to mention the owners, a husband and wife team, are great people. Rob was with me all day, setting up plates, and working with me to figure out the best shots. He was really helpful, which was great, because I don’t always feel like I get that on shoots like this. We wanted to capture some things that were kind of the essence of his place. So of course one of the shots had to be a cheese plate. We wanted to show all different kinds, and also do something a bit creative with it. So we plated it on a nice piece of black slate. I thought the contrast of the light colored cheeses worked nicely for this shot.
We had a lot of fun trying to get this fondue shot to work right. It’s tricky to make a cheese that’s running like that work out well. I setup a sheet of black velvet so that you could actually see the cheese against a darker background.
