Flavorful adaptation; from fashion to food photography!

What’s up, Hive? It’s almost midnight and I’m sitting here on the couch with my laptop heating up while a 4K clip of footage runs through Topaz Video AI to slow down a shot of a coffee being poured to 8X slow motion. It’s going to be a while so while it’s rendering, I thought I’d bang out a blog post. Things have been good lately — finally. Hive account@guthrie is just about to wrap up the school year and his grades are the best they’ve been since starting at his new school. All A’s and B’s. I’m working on a second issue of a zine for the Palestine movement and I’m happy with the art I’m producing for the cover. The garden is in full swing right now and in a few weeks, I’ll be sharing photos of peas, lettuce, strawberries, peppers, tomatoes, asparagus, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, artichokes, spinach, kale and sweet potatoes!

I had an epiphany today during the therapy sessions where I realized that I can gauge my own mental and emotional health based on the care I give my garden. Last year, I was hanging on by a thread. I planted several vegetables but I struggled to care for any of them. I could barely take care of myself. Hive account@guthrie was my priority and thankfully, he did great flourishing with new friends that he made in theater, but behind the scenes, I was a mess. When the season ended, every raised bed was overground with tall grass. I neglected everything. This year, I see the attention I’m giving to weeding […which if you’ve never gardened or been to therapy is a very, very strong metaphor for your own life], tending to the soil, watering and renovating boards and fences to keep the squirrels and rabbits out.

All this consideration of home grown food dovetails nicely with the work I’ve been doing with video and photography. I’m currently working with about eight businesses and restaurants in the Twin Cities shooting food, product and social media campaigns. Considering I was shooting women in lingerie all over the world for over 20 years, I’m shocked that I have so much fun doing this kind of work now but it is genuinely fun. It’s all problem solving, just like dark pinup shoots. This aligns much more with this chapter of my life and I’m grateful that I was able to adapt from one industry to another in only a year’s time. I can be selective about the clients I can take on at this point and in almost every case, they trust me to just do my thing; as long as the final result looks good.

Many of the client are friends I’ve made through the Arab and Muslim communities but even today, I got a call from my friend Rashmi who owns one of my favorite Indian restaurants about beginning a project to shoot, document and market her newest business. The, “art” part of this I can do but I hate the administrative aspect and I recently had a few meetings with a marker and a project manager and the three or us are pulling together so that we can all focus on our strengths which will allow me even more time to be a complete nerd about camera equipment, complex shots and some of the new AI tools available to enhance video. With the summer right around the corner, I’m looking forward to some of these upcoming projects and opportunities. Thanks for reading!