Weekend Cookbook Review

Wow… that was a crazy week. I’ve spent all week going in early, working late and through lunch shooting  so much food… I plan to go through all the work I did and share my favourites from the week, I definitely have a few additions to my portfolio this week!

So the weekend is here at last, yay and I have chosen Jamie’s Great Britain for this weeks cookbook review. I discovered this book about a year ago and it became my go to book for whenever I was shooting anything traditionally British like a Shepherd’s pie. The book is photographed by one of the most the influential and prolific food photographers David Loftus. The food photography in this book is shot in daylight and very honest and very masculine – I have this belief that you can often tell when something is shot by a male or female photographer just by the way it looks and feels… and this feels very male. The propping is very simple if any, food is definitely always the hero but when there is a prop it’s quite often a recognisable brand like HP or Worchester sauce, Marmite, Tiger beer,  which really works, I like text/type in food photography.

The thing that I love the most about this book is all the supporting images that go with the food shots – the locations, the people the raw ingredients, the animals and the markets and shops, they all help to tell the story of the dish. I love photographing English seaside towns so it’s no surprise that my favourite chapter in this cookbook is Seaside! Lovely photos of grey wet England, beach huts, fish market chalk boards, shellfish and fishermen…. beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

It’s a visually delightful book, I find in most useful and inspirational when shooting meat, fish and British foods.

Cookbook review