Just Cured - Experience Fine Foods

Yesterday, I hosted a photography session for Just Cured’s new web site at my home. The opportunity came together at the last minute and the story of how it came about is too long and too boring to tell in detail. In any event, when I saw some work by Carmen Nauseef (blog), I jumped at the chance to have her take a few photos for me.

As the idea for this session first occurred very late last week, the weekend was a whirlwind of activity around the house. My wife completed the rehabilitation of the side garden that was destroyed in the construction of the new wall and gave the rest of the gardens and house exterior a spit shine and polish. I gave the kitchen a not-frequent-enough deep cleaning.

My idea was to show Just Cured’s products in a home party setting, and I plan to use the photos in a lifestyle section of the new web site feature serving suggestions, recipes, entertainment tips and the like. I recruited sister number 4 and her daughter and sister number 1’s daughters 3 and 5 as guests of a garden party. The girls were all lovely.

I hope that Carmen got some good pictures. This was my first experience as the client with a photography session like this. As a result I have no feel for the relative success or failure of the afternoon. I did come away with three things I could have done better:

• I should have recruited more “guests” to get more variety in the photos.
• I should have had an assistant in the kitchen for the afternoon. I didn’t use the photographer’s time efficiently as there were too many (and too long) gaps while I plated or fussed with the products.
• I should have been much more organized. As we were working, I began to see the session as very similar to the closing of a legal transaction, an exercise in organized chaos. In the legal world, I neutralized the chaos by insisting on ultra-organization of the proceedings. In the creative world, I was the rube in the room with the Gomer Pyle look on my face wondering what to do next. I remember seeing lawyers with that look and hoped never to feel the way they obviously were feeling. Yesterday, I found out; I felt out of control; and I didn’t like it.

For all my discomfort with my efforts, Carmen was a joy to work with. I appreciate creative, passionate people and like being around them. I am cautiously confident that her photos will exceed my very high expectations.

I knew that I was going to have a great deal of food left from the session and invited a few neighbors by to help polish it off. I wasn’t offering much variety, smoked and cured salmon a dozen ways doesn’t make for a very interesting dinner menu. But the wine was chilled, and the setting of the new courtyard was lovely.

The company was fantastic. As the light faded, the heat of the day dissipated and the conversation became more animated, I relaxed and decided to worry about how I could have improved the day on some other occasion. We ended the evening inside playing “name the artist” from a playlist of 50s and 60s tunes and the other men conducting a tasting of my long neglected collection of single barrel bourbons and single malts.

Our guests made an early night of it, departing by 10:45. I hope they were refreshed and ready to return to work today.

Please remind me to entertain on Tuesdays more often.

Surprisingly, the artist on this one stumped the music lovers in the crowd:

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