Picture perfect: the food photography of David Loveall

ONE RECENT morning at his photo studio in Eugene, photographer David Loveall fiddled with lights as the art director consulted with the client by cell phone. The stylist swept in with a brush to remove a bit of lint before the shoot got under way. Today's subject: crab cakes, arrayed on a plate with green beans and a bit of garnish.

Loveall, who started out his career as a Navy photojournalist, got into commercial photography when he came to Eugene in 1987. One of his early clients was Chef Francisco, a frozen food manufacturer in town. When the company closed in 1994, Loveall thought the end had come for his business. Instead, the advertising people he had worked with here continued to hire him after they had fanned out to jobs at new companies. Now he may shoot Foster Farms chicken one day, Ore-Ida potatoes the next. (He also photographs other products, such as furniture.)

Today's shoot will create a new label for frozen crab cakes produced by FishKing, a company in Seattle. As planned by art director Brian Sabin, the label will show a dinner plate, which holds two crab cakes, a pile of green beans, a couple of lemon slices and some sauce. First there was the problem with the sauce. Sabin had sketched out a picture of crab cakes sitting on top of a swirl of red sauce - ketchup, perhaps - but the client wouldn't go for it. Not realistic.

"The client said that's not a common usage," Sabin explained. "This is a product that sells 75 percent on the East Coast. They use a lot of tartar sauce there." But tartar sauce is so bland and white it didn't look very good in a test shot. A mustard sauce was tried instead. That didn't work any better. "So our last call to the client was, could we just get rid of the sauce and forget it?" Sabin said. "We don't really need it." Ten minutes later the cell phone rang again. "OK, ah, we don't have to have the sauce," Sabin reported. "We're OK without it."

On a typical food shoot, Loveall and Sabin begin work with a food stylist and a couple of assistants about 8:30 a.m., usually not taking the first actual photograph until about 11 a.m. Up to that time, they're fiddling - cooking the food, arranging lights, tending to the million tiny details that make a crab cake look delicious and edible instead of like a brown hockey puck. For this shoot, Loveall used a small soft box - a highly diffuse light that casts no harsh shadows - and two spotlights, which raked across the plate to give highlights. He tweaked the intricate lighting scheme with tiny bits of mirror, colored filters and small blocks of wood for shadows.

With a 4-by-5-inch view camera positioned directly above the plate, Loveall began shooting Polaroid pictures to check his lighting and discovered that the two patties seemed to blend into one vague object. He raised the edge of the top cake and inserted a quarter-inch section of wooden dowel to hold it up. Instant edge.

Meanwhile, at a kitchen counter in the corner of the studio, food stylist Carol Ladd was using tweezers to arrange green beans, one at a time, for the final shot. She called this plate the "hero'; the one used for adjusting the lights was just a stand-in. Ladd, who's been a food stylist for 18 years, had come down from Portland for today's shoot. She carries a small kitchen with her on the job, not counting on anything being present when she arrives. Her tool box contains knives, forks and spoons; but also tweezers, brushes, fish line and a blow torch. She used to spray WD-40 on food to make it glisten; once a client ate a piece of WD-40'd meatloaf during a shoot. (`You never eat the food at a food shoot," Sabin warns.) In recent years, Ladd's tried for a more natural look in her food, and water works as well as machine oil. The worst food to shoot? "Ice cream. Real ice cream."

Like any movie star, Ladd's hero will look perfect. "I'm trying to make it look natural," she said. "Like it was just scooped up." To make sure she's got a perfectly photogenic pair of crab cakes, she's browned about two dozen in the oven. One secret to food photography, she said, is undercooking. The beans are cooked just enough to turn them green. The crab cakes have only just been browned. Some things - such as turkey - aren't really cooked at all. She'll steam a turkey only long enough to plump it up, then paint the skin with a mixture of soap, kitchen bouquet and bitters. Then she gets out the blow torch and browns it.

"If you cook a turkey all the way through it looks terrible," Sabin said. "It looks like your mom's turkey. The skin is all pulled back from the legs."

Ladd had the hero about ready to go. Sabin checked the plate and suggested - apologetically - that the beans not be allowed to overlap the product in any way. She made a final adjustment, wiped the edge of the plate clean, and delivered it to the camera. Loveall looked carefully. "I think we're out to the edge a little more with the patties than we were." Ladd tweaked the patties and produced a piece of parsley for final garnish. The parsley didn't work. Too dark. Ladd headed back to the kitchen for a sprig of celery.

One of the toughest shoots Loveall and Sabin can recall involved photographing a live chicken in Creswell for a poultry company. "We thought it would be the easiest thing in the world," Sabin said. "Well, they're not very attractive after they've been riding in the truck and relieving themselves on each other." In the end, they bathed a chicken, dried it with a hair drier and then combed it out. "We actually styled the feathers with a comb," Sabin said. After the shot, the primped and preened chicken went right back on the processing line to become someone's dinner.

Fussing over the crab cakes, Ladd arranged the celery stick, then brushed water lightly over the lemon slices. Sabin took a quick, hard look. "On the garnish...?" he began, tactfully.

"Yeah," Ladd said. "Too light."

"Would the dill be better?"

Ladd brought out the dill, carefully arranged it on the plate, and Loveall made one more lighting check. He shot the last of half a dozen Polaroids and, at last, liked what he saw. Then he loaded the camera with conventional film and shot half a dozen shots, lighting each with two pops of the flash, changing exposure just slightly for each one.

A label is born.

"That's it," Sabin said. "That's the whole process. Ninety-nine percent is the preparation. And then it's anti-climactic. After all this work you take a couple shots and you're done."

March 1, 2000