Rouses_May-June-2018

LOCAL SOCIAL

If you love recipes and photographs of food, follow @RousesMarkets and these Gulf Coast bloggers, Instagrammers and food photographers for inspiration.

• • • And in this era when everyone — from chefs to dining enthusiasts — is continuously posting photos of their latest cheese plate or over-the-top dessert to social media channels, what advice do professional food photographers have for snap-happy amateurs? “It’s important to consider the context of the food you’re photographing,” says Rush Jagoe, a photographer based in New Orleans. “You have to think about the inspiration for it: the chef and the story that they’re trying to tell with the food. If possible, it makes a big impact to try and incorporate the things that were important to the chef in making the dish into the photo. It helps tell that story.” A seasoned culinary photographer, Jagoe’s captured everything from plate lunches to oyster shucking, and served as the photographer for James Beard Award- winner Alon Shaya’s recently released cookbook, Shaya . “When you’re photographing food, some things are easy and beautiful, especially if there’s this incredible sculptural plate of food that a chef spent years understanding how to make. But sometimes, it’s just red beans and rice. Some people scoff at that and say, ‘You can’t take a pretty picture of beans!’ That’s not true. It’s all about the textures on the plate and how they interact to make a pretty composition.” For Lafayette’s Denny Culbert — a culinary photographer with an equally illustrious resume — the importance of getting the correct lighting can’t be overstated. “The most important tip from a technical standpoint for taking food photographs is to not mix light sources. For example, if you’re using window light as your primary light source (which I recommend), try to

block out the light from the restaurant with a menu or a napkin.” One of Culbert’s latest ventures has been working on Chef Isaac Toups’ new book, Chasing the Gator: Isaac Toups and the New Cajun Cooking , which will be released this October. “Honestly, though, my best advice is to work quickly, so that you can still enjoy your food in the state that the chef intended it to be eaten. As a food photographer, I don’t get that luxu- ry, so I end up seeing a lot more beautiful food than I ever get to actually taste!” • • • Then, there are the trailblazers. Back when the all-consuming impact of social media — threaded tweets, Snapchat stories and all — was just a twinkle in the eye of a budding online influencer, a first- generation wave of food bloggers were already laying the groundwork for new ways of sparking discussion, sharing recipes and conjuring up serious mealtime envy for anyone with a mouse and keyboard. “My whole life I’ve been obsessed with food,” says Amanda Gibson, owner of Lemon Baby, a blog that helps readers tackle even the trickiest of recipes with confidence. “When I was a child, my parents once came home to find me wrapping shrimp in snow peas because I had seen it in a Martha Stewart cookbook. I was obsessed with Martha Stewart. I poured over pictures of canapés — which I guess 7-year-olds shouldn’t be doing — but I was enamored with how beautiful food can be.” The Mobile-based blogger, who launched her first blog, Mixing in Mobile, in 2009, created her current online outpost in 2016, and has since become a go-to resource for all things local and seasonal along the Gulf Coast. “I tend to take things that intimidate people and show them that it’s not that scary. For

example, French macarons. They can be so finicky! But with practice, you can definitely make them. You just have to have a little bit of confidence.” Similar to social media, blogs that follow the tenets of high-quality online content — gorgeous photos, personality-driven prose, a unique voice — tend to gain legions of loyal readers and fans, each hungrier than the last for the next post. “Like a lot of bloggers who have been in [the business] for eight years or more, I actually started with coupons,” says Rachel Mouton of Acadiana Thrifty Mom in Lafayette. “Extreme couponing was popular then, and I ran the website for a small group of coupon people.One day, the local news station called, and after I went on there, then I ended up being the ‘Coupon Lady’ on Good Morning Acadiana . It kind of snowballed.”

Rachel Mouton, Acadiana Thrifty Mom

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