Star Menu
These are some of the dishes that were created for the new Planet Bar & Restaurant. We followed a lot of them on the journey from raw ingredient through inspiration to delicious result. According to chef Liebenberg's philosophy, there was no fussing about or styling the food. It was shot exactly as it came out of his kitchen, and if this is any indication of what Planet Restaurant will offfer, I'm going to be a regular patron.
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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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Getting Fresh
Chef Rudi Liebenberg believes in using any means possible, every contact, friend, rumour or whisper, to source the finest ingredients for the Mount Nelson's kitchens. There are regular meetings with his team leaders to discuss new fresh produce suppliers, or a cheese from a new estate. Research is followed by discussion, then sketches of what might work, then he heads for the pots.
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Model T Fjord
After my recent assignment in Europe, I took some time out to visit my brother-in-law Jason who works for 5 months of the year at an exclusive fishing lodge in Western Norway. The place is breathtaking, and it was like a dream to be there. I also happened to be on hand while the owners were engaged in a project to restock the river with wild salmon. The images that follow form part of a story I captured during my four day visit.
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Kitchen Team

When Louise Pheiffer of the Mount Nelson called with a request to shoot a menu for their restaurant, i thought "Why not? I'm a highly trained professional. Of course one of the iconic hotels of the world is going to invite  me to work with them."

When I heard the brief, I thought it must be a mate of mine kidding around. Instead of prescribing stiff, static table-top images, Louise gave me carte blanche to document the venue, the kitchen and the food the way I saw it. Dream job.
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Apples & Pears
An assignment in southern Germany took journalist Nikki Werner and I into a part of that industrious country that I never knew existed. We were there to do a story on a producer of pear and apple champagnes and juices made with heritage varieties of the fruits. What we found was a wonderland populated by marvellous people. What amazing characters these people are - and humbling to see how hard they work and how healthy and fit they are, just like the fields they cultivate.
Pear Champagne
The story we went to Germany to do centers on Jorg Geiger and the work he has been doing to preserve both the heritage fruit varieties in the region where he lives, and to preseve a traditional way of agricultural life. He is unbelievably industrious, working long hours at his craft, and it pays of in a selection of juices, wines and schnapps which are just incredibly good.
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Sprigs
This is a project which I conceptualised as a means to test my first digital SLR back in 2005. It was all shot on a Canon 350D with a 50mm f2.5 Macro lens. Created for Sprigs: The Food Shop, they were series of A2 sheets printed on both sides, then perforated and folded down to A4. It was great because I was photographer, art director, stylist and publisher on the project.
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Second Bite
This is my second shoot at Overture with chef Bertus Basson. It is no secret that I love his work and it is my favourite restaurant to visit. On this day I was a guest for lunch at Overture and simply photographed what was happening around me.
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who moved my...
Dalewood Cheese is a really special company based on a family farm in the Western Cape. Shooting these images for Petrina Visser sparked the idea of a cheese book about artisanal cheese makers like Petrina in South Africa. With a book deal in hand, I am getting to work with my team to shoot, write and design the book for publication in 2011. This is a taste of the kind of images we will be looking for, and what you can expect from the book.
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Zambezi Queen

Recently  I took a trip to Botswana and do a travel feature on the Zambezi Queen. I had no idea what to expect, and found the most exquisite African travel experience I have ever had. The ZQ is an oversized houseboat, with twelve luxury rooms and five star service, cruising on the Zambezi river. The thing about it is that the scenery constantly changes. You can lie on your bed and gaze out between your feet at game coming to the river to splash and drink. It was amazing.
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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. There is no electricity here, so everything is done by hand. Being there is kind of like stepping back a hundred years...

Photographer portraits courtesy Michelle Stott
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Biltong
Sometimes you come across subjects that are so obscure that they just beg to be explored in a series of images. Ever tried searching for images of that strange South African dried, spiced meat called biltong? This is part of a journey from raw meat to finished item, observed for form and use.
Mushrooms
This series of images was shot for The Mushroom Board to show the versatility of mushrooms in the hands of a skilled chef. I was given carte blanche by their PR company Riana Greenblo Communications to make pretty pictures of the the work of the fabulous chef patron of Bizerka Restaurant in Cape Town.
Italian
Is italian food only about pasta. How is it eaten? And how do you show the enjoyment and simple pleasure of a meal using only still life and not shooting people sitting around a table laughing?
Chinese
Because we live in such a melting pot of cultures - and are fascinated with the way other people eat - assignments are always coming in for different ethnic cuisines. I love doing the oriental ones where you get to go shopping for really cool and unusual stuff.
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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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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.
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Sprigs Entertain
Sprigs Entertain is my latest book project with Clare and Fiona Ras the incomparable chef twins from Durban. I'd 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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Lazy Lobster
What could be better than a lazy day by the sea, feasting on that great gift of the ocean - the lobster? We were invited by Marco of Lagosta to spend a day with a few of his mates, cooking, chatting and drinking fine champagne at his uncle's lobster farm on the West Coast. No models were used in the making of this photo essay. These are real people, and they really are all Marco's friends. Some lobsters died and we pay tribute to them here. They gave their lives so that we might feast.
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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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Overture
My true delight in shooting restaurants is 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 Basson at Overture Restaurant near Stellenbosch 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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