Editorial: Photographing Food with Vanessa Rogers

Our food photographer shares her tricks.

We’re thrilled to lay out so many dining options for you this month. Those dishes all seem so lush and so easy to inhale. What’s often not so easy, though, is photographing them to best effect, and so I consulted our very gifted photographer Vanessa Rogers on the art of, say, capturing ice cream before it melts or beer when the foam starts going flat.

There are tricks, used more often for the demands of ad campaigns—editorial shoots play it more the way they find things. On the ad side, Vanessa reports, she once spotted trays and trays of chicken for a well-known chain with people painting the grill marks on all the pieces. It’s well-known, too, she says, that vegetable shortening colored like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry or whatever will give you the look of luscious ice cream without melting before your very eyes and the click of your camera. And would you believe that salt will restore the foam for your beer shot?

Perhaps the worst experience she had on the editorial side was shooting at a restaurant in Fort Myers for one of Gulfshore Life’s dining reviews. “The meat presented,” Vanessa recalls, “was frozen. There was no way to work with that. They said they didn’t want to waste any food. I took some pictures of the interior of the place and that’s what we had to run with.” Of course, there are those challenges when the chefs cook up dishes that taste better than they look. That’s when Vanessa becomes a food stylist, too. Gulfshore Life Creative Director Tessa Tilden-Smith remembers one such shoot when Vanessa took to cutting up strawberries and arranging them artistically to add some color and texture to the mix.

But Vanessa wants to talk about the art and beauty possible, which brings us to perhaps her all-time favorite food project, Sea Salt, the book she did for Sea Salt star chef Fabrizio Aielli. “He creates beautiful art,” Vanessa says of his delicacies, and over a period of nearly two years she worked to make them appear both glorious and scrumptious. With one of the photos she truly treasures—a photo of a Watermelon, Berry and Pistachio Halva Salad (which ran as Gulfshore Life’s May cover)—Vanessa shot it on a Plexiglas plate with velveteen underneath to achieve the breathtaking, vivid effect she wanted.

See some of Vanessa's work here.

When Vanessa first came to Naples in 2003, she intended to do fashion photography. Her formal training in photography had been in New York City at the Fashion Institute of Technology, with continuing education at the School of Visual Arts there. After earning her degree, she spent the next few years freelancing and developing a visual style—even as she assisted acclaimed New York lifestyle and travel photographer Augustus Butera.

“But this is not really a fashion market,” Vanessa says. And so she turned to the lifestyle—the food, entertaining and happy outdoor living arenas. For publications (85 percent of her work) and commercial clients, she’s been all over Florida, the Caribbean, Bali, Thailand and even back in New York. And Vanessa has many a colorful tale to tell from these assignments.

Shooting in tall grass on a farm once, she felt an itch on her hip that didn’t seem to go away. She ignored it as long as she could to get the shots she was after, but then there was the sting. It turns out a scorpion had crawled up her leg under the loose-fitting pants Vanessa was wearing. She crushed the invader once in place and once more on the outside just for good measure. “Fortunately,” Vanessa says, “it was not poisonous. But I had what was called necrosis and my hip was black for a month.”

On two separate occasions, she was tasked by magazines to capture a woman running on the beach into the surf. Both times, Vanessa could not find a suitable subject. And both times, therefore, she photographed herself racing into the water. In both cases, the shots became the covers for the magazines; not a bad choice, considering Vanessa’s attractive cover-girl looks.

What lies ahead? Vanessa’s creative genes are running free. Will she emerge in Colorado, where she loves the rolling hills, the mountains, the crisp, fresh air? Will she follow her dream of traveling the world shooting for Vogue and Travel + Leisure? Or will she zero in some more on an evolving style of intimate, personal photography? Stay tuned. In the meantime, look for her stunning food shots in Gulfshore Life (except when the meat is frozen).