Weltevrede

The fig harvest at Weltefrede farm in the Karoo is a beautiful thing. Work starts at 6:30 in the morning with a prayer and bible reading, then the drying racks are set out in the sun. While the men head out into the orchards, the women start to sort and process the figs.

The setting is quite stunning - an green oasis in the midst of stony, scrubby, arid Karoo.  Migrant workers singing in the orchards is punctuated by the loud report of a gas cannon which booms out across the valley to scare marauding birds. There is no electricity here, just wind and solar power and a couple of generators, so everything is done by hand. Being there is kind of like stepping back a hundred years...

Photographer studies courtesy Michelle Stott

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Karoo Gem
This little town in the Karoo is an absolute gem. There is an amazing wealth of food production that goes on there. I was introduced to the town by Jeremy Freemantle who runs African Relish, a cooking school and hub of food activity. Gay's dairy produces cheese, milk and cream, then there's jammon serrano, figs, apricots, honey, lamb, dessert wine... Add some fine restaurants and classic characters to the mix and you have a town you'll never want to leave.
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Lunch Spot
The Kitchen is currently my favourite lunch spot in Cape Town. Karen Dudley is well known as the queen of groovy catering in the Mother City and now she's opened a coffee shop and eatery in Sir Lowry Road where she feeds people from the surrounding ad agencies and businesses with amazing sandwiches, salads, simple hot lunches and awesome pastries. The shop is a reflection of Karen, quirky, ecclectic, warm and welcoming - and it's a fantastic place to shoot.
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Newsletter
This is part of a body of work that I have been working on with Cape Town stylist Lisa Clark. It was for NoMU which produces a monthly newsletter to go out to customers and consumers with recipes and suggestions of how to use their various products. Working on this gave me the opportunity to explore a whole new creative avenue with Lisa.
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People
 One of the reasons that I love my work so much is that I get to work with people. Every day is filled with creaive and talented people, so it is inevitable that I occasionally turn my camera on them. Although I am always a food photographer first, portraiture is a skill that I continue to use and develop.
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Sheets
 This is a project which I conceptualised as a means to publish some beautiful food photography, free of the constraints of commercial or publisher interests. Created for Sprigs: The Food Shop, they were a series of A2 sheets printed on both sides, then perforated and folded down to A4. They sold for 15 bucks and gave customers 6 to 8 eight recipes to take home with them. I acted as photographer, art director, stylist and publisher on the project.
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Essentials
Working with the packaging team at Woolworths has produced some amazing work which lines the shelves of this top South African food retailer. Some of the images used here - particularly the oils and vinegars - really pushed the boundaries of what was possiible within tight packaging budgets. However, the results in layout were simply stunning.
Dried Fruit
Much of the commercial photography work I do is for packaging. It never ceases to amaze me when I am shopping and I pick up something that has my work emblazoned on it. Too often the work is mundane, but when you work with a talented designer or a top design agency and they involve you in the process, the work can be stunning. This series of packaging, shot with stylist Lisa Clarke, for a range of dried fruit product needed the appeal of colour so it would be attractice to kids as an alternative to sweets.
I&J
Working with commercial food stylist Julita Hirner raised the bar considerably in shooting a range of packaging for I&J's innovative range of fresh fish and accompanying rubs and glazes.
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In-Store
Produce is a project cooked up between myself and photographer/designer Nigel Deary. Basically, we combine our skills as visual artists with our various portfolios as food writers, food retail and packaging designers and dedicated epicureans to come up with concepts and visual images for food retail spaces.
Everfresh in Durban was my first project, and involved a complete redesign from logo and uniforms to merchandising display and in-store images for this family-owned chain of grocery stores.
Woolworths In-store
A joint project under the auspices of Produce with designer/photographer Nigel Deary, this work is displayed in all Newly refurbished or opened branches of Woolworths. It is mainly placed on bulkheads in the foodhalls and brings the provenance message to the "Good Food Journey" which the retail chain is so well known for.
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Taste - Granadilla
This was one of the first features I worked on with Abigail Donnelly, food editor of Taste Magazine. I always rely on her wonderful creativity to push my work in new directions, and I love this feature for its inventiveness with the ingredients and for the quality of light.
Regional Italian
This feature on regional Italian pasta dishes was created for Country Life Magazine with stylist Camilla Comins.
VISI
Visi is a stunning visual feast of a magazine and at the time I shot this feature for them, I was incredibly proud to have my work feature in it. It took an entire morning to build a light set so I could shoot this - those were the days before I had a studio with a black room.
BBC - Olive
When Elizabeth Galbraith called from London to ask me to shoot for BBC's Olive Magazine, I throught it was a mate pulling my leg. It wasn't, however and I have now completed two commissions - of 12 and then 8 pages - for the magazine's food and travel section.
Kitchen Secrets
Each month I work with my favourite food editor Nikki Werner to produce a series of features called Kitchen Secrets for Fair Lady Magazine. We go into ordinary people's homes and capture them cooking their favourite meals, with no special tools apart from camera and a polystyrene board. It is real and immediate and Nikki and I meet loads of really wonderful people together.
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Vinegar
Another commercial food packaging job that really got the juices flowing so to speak was this series of shots of vinegar. The Cape Town based agency Brand Tree provided a lot of latitude in my approach and they consistently book me for really challenging work that I love to put in my portfolio.
Olive Oil
When I shot this olive oil for the packaging of a range of flavoured oils for a prominent food retailer, I never bargained on the mess it was going to make. Thie images however made it all worthwhile.
Red Wine
I don't think there's a food photographer on the planet who hasn't been asked to shoot red wine swirling in a glass. Everyone seems to be inspired to do this by the moving image in a sequence that promotes the BBC Food channel. Here's my contribution to the milieu:
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Bloke

Bloke is a book project I embarked on with chef, fisherman and hunter Jason Comins. It is a cookbook by a bloke for blokes and is aimed at equipping men with all the stuff they need to know how to cook, like fillet on a barbeque, whole fish, lasagne and so on. We worked together to give the whole thing a rough, just-cooked feeling, looking at the sort of ingredients guys would tackle and resisting the temptation to style it.

The fabulous, no-frills design and layout was created by the bloke across the road, designer Ian Mackie who took a simple idea and made into a simple book which still manages to be a visual feast.
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Sprigs Entertain
Sprigs Entertain is my latest book project with Clare and Fiona Ras the incomparable chef twins from Durban. It will be on shelf at mid-year and marks a bit of a turning point for me photographically. I've been wanting to push the boundaries with a looser, more "real" style of shooting. By teaming up with stylist Jo Badenhorst and allowing her complete freedom to work as she sees things unfolding - and then literally shooting over her shoulder while she's in the moment - we have made some beautiful images together.
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Harvest
This book of recipes from an organic farm saw a return to my love of documenting all aspects of food production. I worked on it for two months in 2008 and it hit the shelves in October of that year. Harvest has received tremendous media coverage and continues to sell strongly throughout the country. It is a fitting tribute to the passion and tireless work of organic winemaker, farmer and cook Christine Stevens and her family.
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Sprigs
This book was produced for Sprigs Food Shop in 2006. It was planned over two days, shot in four days at the restaurant while it was operating, and then designed and sent to print within a week. It was an exercise in what can be achieved with a camera, a polystyrene reflector and modern desktop publishing. The first print-run sold out in a year. It generated untold publicity in the review columns of magazines as well as excellent profits and is now in its second printing.
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The Farm Kitchen
This book about the food and produce of a South African farm was published by New Holland Publishers in 2006. After an initial release of 15,000 copies in South Africa, it was translated into Dutch and launched in the Netherlands in September 2007.
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Overture
With my books and editorial work, I spend a lot of time shooting restaurants. Mostly, it's a rush and we shoot a few finished dishes and a quick portrait of the chef. However, my true delight is in having time to get under the skin of a venue and to be let loose in the kitchen. It's part of my fascination with documenting food from soil to fork - I love the characters, the processes and the spaces. These images are from a morning spent with chef Bertus at his incomparable Overture Restaurant in the Cape Winelands.
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Bread
Trevor Daly is a true artisan, baking bread in his wood-fired oven on a patch of mountainside in the Western Cape. He rises at dawn on a Friday to light the oven haul spring water and mix his doughs. Once the oven hits temperature, he bakes late into night so he has fresh bread for sale at Cape Town's Neighbourgoods market on Saturday mornings. I joined him at dawn one morning to document the process from the first burning twig to delicious sourdough loaves.
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I have worked as a professional photographer for the past eleven years, supplying food and lifestyle images to a host of magazines and advertising agencies.

Over time, I have also written numerous features on food and consulted to clients in the food industry on matters pertaining to restaurant or store design as well as marketing.

In fact, these days I refer to myself as a creative professional working in the arena of food. I wasn't always a photographer. Before I chose this path I worked in the world of advertising and therefore bring a unique combination of skills to my work.

Creative direction, interpreting briefs, publishing, copy-writing - all these go hand-in-hand with the creation of enduring, contemporary images of food and the lifestyle associated with it.
   Russel Wasserfall
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