Cookbook - Teen Baking Bootcamp by Matthew Merril

Release day is today for the latest cookbook I shot, Teen Baking Bootcamp: 60 Essential Recipes to Take You From Amateur to Pro by Matthew Merril. This was such a fun shoot with a great guy, and we had a lot of excitement as Matthew baked all 60 recipes over 5 busy shoot days, lots of credit due for the hard work he put into making this book happen. Credit goes out to Diana Jeffra who excellently food-styled a bunch of the book and to the team at Page Street Publishing who entrusted me with producing the shoot, I’m so happy this is finally out for everyone to enjoy!

Purchase at:

Bookshop.org (Independent) - Amazon US - Barnes & Noble

Shoots - February 2022 Photo Dump

Lots of smaller productions and a little bit of travel for February, shooting everything from Valentine’s content for Walmart to lifestyle photos for a restaurant group. Also explored LA a bit more and went down to Carlsbad, CA for a couple days to support my girlfriend in a new tourism board campaign (Try the oysters at Carlsbad Aquafarm!).

Shoot - Barcelona Wine Bar - Dallas TX

Fun Fact: We initially scheduled this shoot over 2 years ago, but because of crazy world events, it took us this long to get back into the production of it! I had an excellent few days down in Dallas shooting atmosphere, food, and interiors for Barcelona who I’ve worked with at several locations now, producing stills for their image-libraries. There is always a little voyeurism in capturing a live restaurant space, and this location’s design produced a lot of nooks and vignettes of guests and team members interacting that created interesting dynamics for the shoot.

Shoot - bartaco - Washington DC

I’ve been shooting for the bartaco brand for as long as it’s been around, and while the restaurants are always designed in a similar fashion, I take that as a challenge when I’m shooting in one of their new locations, to create new and interesting content for them to use on social and internally for hiring or reference. I also experimented with using continuous lights on this shoot for the bartender portraits, It did a great a deal of help in capturing those exact expressions and generating some more excitement during the day!

Shoot - Bertucci's Pizza x Christian Petroni

I get such a rush working on last-minute productions, and it’s even better when working with long time friends! I met Christian Petroni years ago before he made the jump to celebrity chef status, and I’m so glad we still talk and work together after all this time. Christian let me know the week before Christmas that there might be a shoot happening for his collaboration with Bertucci’s, a long time New England chain of Italian restaurants (who remembers throwing dough at them in the 80s and 90s?), and it needed to be done prior to NYE. I got all the ducks in a row and we knocked out a full day of shooting to produce the portraits, food images, and all the variants needed for all their marketing pieces which turned out great!