040: Art, Adversity, Ambition: Christina Peters' Path

Mica: [00:00:00] Welcome to the 40th episode of The Savory Shot. First off, a massive welcome to all of y'all amazing listeners out there. Y'all know who I be. I'm your host with the most, Mica McCook. I'm a food photographer and I am here in Austin, Texas. Y'all, I can't believe that this is the 40th episode of The Savory Shot.

40! Hell yeah! 40 episodes, y'all, of deep, enchanting, and authentic adventures in this amazing world called food photography. I love it here, y'all! I really do! 10 more episodes and we'll have reached the big 5 0. Holy shit! I'm ready. Are y'all? I feel like once we reach that big 5 0 that there needs to be some kind of, I don't know, celebration.

Like, I gotta celebrate this. This [00:01:00] is a huge milestone. So I'm gonna think about some things I want to do. I'm open to ideas. Hit me up on what you think I should do or we should do to celebrate, but before I go one step further, y'all know I can not start this show off without expressing a heartfelt thank you to each and every one of y'all.

To the longtime followers, my ride or dies, who've been with me since the humble beginnings, episode one, and to the new faces joining us today on what I like to call the Hot Mess Express, thank you for giving this show a chance, your enthusiasm, your support is what feels this show. And for that, I'm eternally grateful.

There's so much work that goes into a show like this. But every single time I get a message from y'all, or a comment, it makes everything worth it. So thank you for being here. Thank you for [00:02:00] being part of this crazy journey. Now it's the first month of the year. It's a time brimming with energy and aspirations and the promise of new beginnings.

So how's the month treating y'all so far? I hope you got your sights set high and your dreams big. If you are starting the new year doing awesome things, pushing boundaries and setting the stage for an unforgettable year, I want you to stand up and shout, "Hootie hooo"

Unless you're at work or you're in a coffee shop or in a library, don't do that. You might get kicked out. But also, if you're struggling this month, that's all right too. We got you, boo. If your big accomplishment for the month of January is getting out of bed, And putting your hair in a ponytail or maybe putting on a bra or I don't know checking your email.

That's cool, too. It's month one. Take care of you boo. But let's [00:03:00] bring the focus back to the here and now I want to talk about this episode y'all. Today I am beyond thrilled to introduce our first guest of the year, holy shit. This is our first guest of the year and y'all I could not have picked a better person.

Our guest embodies the spirit of creativity and expertise. Y'all I will not keep you hanging for much longer. I present. Christina Peters. If you're part of the food photography world, her name needs no introduction. Like, you should know who she is, you should worship the ground she walks on, but for those who are just getting their feet wet, boo things, you're in for a treat.

Christina isn't just a food photographer, y'all. She's a storyteller, an artist. a mentor. Christina has been an award winning [00:04:00] commercial food photographer for more than 25 years.

Damn, y'all talk about street cred. She's also a blogger, best selling author. workshop instructor, and online educator. Y'all, she has this membership site called Food Photography Club, and when I first got into food photography, her site was one of the first ones that I joined. And y'all, if you haven't seen it, go to it.

It is one of the best. Best resources out there. There are so many videos, so many videos teaching you how to be a better food photographer. But it's not just the, the, the teaching you how to be a food photographer. She also talks about the business side. It's been around since 2017. There are hundreds of food photographers in this group. [00:05:00] She also has a Facebook group that has more than 6, 000 members. Y'all, go to it.

Check it out. And let me tell you about this conversation. Oof. Oof. Oof. Oof. Oof. Oof. Y'all, we had one of those meaty, chunky conversations. We talked about her moving out at age 16, which, holy shit. I still think is insane. Her experience as an assistant to over 35 photographers. What? And. Why it's important for photographers to advocate for themselves.

I hope y'all are ready for an episode that is sure to leave you inspired, educated, and maybe, maybe just a little bit hungrier for more. But hold on, y'all. Hold on. Before we dive into all of that goodness, grab your favorite snack or a cocktail. It's five o'clock somewhere, or if you're [00:06:00] having one of those kind of days, maybe you need a second espresso.

Whatever you got to do, find it, find a comfy spot, and let's start the show.

Mica: I want to start off this interview with, thank you for being here. Every time I reach out to a guest and I'm like, Gosh, I hope they say yes, because I have nothing to offer but my heart and lint [00:07:00] in my pockets. Every time someone says yes, it's just a huge honor. So thank you very much for being on the show.

Christina: You're so welcome and thanks. Thanks for having me here. It's fun. I always like doing this.

Mica: I want to take it back to when you were a kid and being eight years old and using your dad's camera. I thought that was just the coolest thing.

What stands out to you about those early experiences?

Christina: Yeah, it's, it's funny because my father. introduce me to photography so that it would be a fun hobby for me. Was never intended to instigate a career to start a career. I really liked it. It was very fun for me and and it was challenging. So he let me have a dark room.

He helped me with setting up black and white printing at home and, the whole time I'm doing all this stuff, everything looked really, really [00:08:00] horrible. And so it just triggered this the challenge of trying to figure out, how do I get what's in my mind visually onto a piece of paper?

And how do I do that? So I really started trying to learn as much about photography as I could. Of course, this is way before the internet. We had to use the library. Take as many photo classes as I could and stuff like that. By the time I was a teenager, I remember he wanted to have a serious conversation and asked me what I was intending on doing with my career.

He was thinking that this was going to get me on to his train, which was being a chemist. When I told him I wanted to be a photographer, he was really upset. He was just like, okay, that is not what I intended for you. He wanted me to take over his studies at where he worked. I was like what do you mean?

You're the one that [00:09:00] introduced, I'm a photographer because of you, like you started it. You know, This is your fault, dude.

Mica: This is a, this is a, a product of your success.

Christina: Yeah. Like I thought this is what you wanted and he was like, no, this should be a hobby. So I was like no, I want to be a photographer and you hate your corporate world. So why would you want that for me? And he was like, Oh. Then he gave me the ultimatum if I wanted to be a chemist, he would support me with that.

If I wanted to be a photographer, I was on my own. So I moved out at the age of 16 and was like, okay, I'm out.

Mica: That's terrifying. I'm like thinking back to 16 year old and I'm like.

Christina: No, no, I, I was in a very small town Newark, Delaware. So it was way easier at that time to do something like this. And it's a college town. So I just rented an apartment on Main Street with four other girls, and I had three waitressing jobs. I was still in high school and, I [00:10:00] was like, okay, this is how you do it.

Mica: Wow. Was he a photographer himself? Was photography a hobby of his?

Christina: Oh yeah. He took a lot of photos. Looking back at what he shot, he never really improved his work. My father was an arrogant man and he really felt like no one could teach him anything new, that kind of a thing. And so he never took photo classes or anything like that.

So very quickly, as a teenager, I surpassed his knowledge of photography and how to print properly and, how lenses worked and lighting and all of that. He didn't use any strobe lighting or anything like that. So very quickly what few conversations we had. He didn't want to talk about it anymore because I knew, I think it's because I knew more than he did and he [00:11:00] wasn't good at talking to people like that, so even, even all the way through his life he never, ever wanted to talk about photography with me.

Mica: Cause it's one of those things, it's she proved me wrong, damn it.

Christina: Yeah. I, but he if I had a slow time in my career, then he was like, told you, you know. He was, he was definitely offended. I think his ego was bruised that I didn't want to take over his studies. He was shocked that I could even think of doing something else, like why wouldn't I want to follow in his footsteps?

He was pretty famous in the chemistry world. And he worked for a very large chemical company out here. So he was just like, I've completely offended that I didn't want to become a chemist, but he hated the corporate structure. He did not like where he worked. And he [00:12:00] talked about it every night at the dinner table, every night.

Mica: So like, why wouldn't he be surprised that you're like, Ooh?

Christina: He was like this is just what you got to do. You have to have a regular income. You have to have something steady. You're going to be a starving artist. And I was like, no, there's this thing called commercial photography. I want to do ad work. I'll do the fine art stuff all the time for myself, but there's a lot of money in advertising.

I was like, it's everywhere. Again, this is before the internet, right? So I was like, you drive down the road, you go to a store, you are bombarded by advertising everywhere. People get paid to do that work.

Mica: My mom was the same way when I decided to pursue theater and she was like, wait, what? I thought theater was just something that you, like extracurricular, I didn't, I didn't think you would actually look at it as a career choice.

But you raised me this way. You told me to never follow anyone's path. Follow [00:13:00] my own path. So why are you surprised that I'm actually following your advice?

Christina: That's the ironic thing, right? So my dad, his dad got him an interview at the company where his dad worked. And in the interview, my dad told the guy, I don't want to work here. I, I want to be a chemist. My parents are British. So at that time it was common to move to South Africa if you were a Brit.

He was like, we're going to get the, whatever out of here. Chemistry was his ticket out of England and it was. He worked for companies like Palmolive. He worked for a lot of soap companies at that time but in a field called gas chromatography. A gas chromatograph is a machine that analyzes gaseous substances and it tells you what's in it.

And it was revolutionary at that time. And he worked with one of the men that invented the machine. Many years before that. So that was his field of study. It was brand new field [00:14:00] and I was changing the chemical world radically in a manner that was, really very helpful for everyone to be able to analyze a substance and tell you exactly what's in it.

So yeah, so he was fascinated by that and he was just like, this will guarantee you a career. I'm like, dude you have several friends that got laid off in their 60s. Why would I ever consider working for a company that did that? I'm a teenager in the 80s.

So in the 80s, all of the major chemical companies around here started doing some mega layoffs. They were laying off people who had been working for them for decades. And they were in their fifties, and they were in their sixties, and they'd never worked anywhere before. And now they gotta scramble and figure out how to get another job?

Mica: Devastating.

Christina: And I was like, ah, [00:15:00] ah, dude, I'm not signing up for that program. Why would you want me to even be part of that? At the same time, my father actually was pretty sexist, but, always looking back, he never told me I couldn't do photography and he wanted me to be a chemist.

So it was like, he's actually a pretty sexist person, but here he is thinking his daughter could do it or whatever. He never ever said the words to me that I couldn't do something. But then he was like, all right you think you got this all figured out? You're on your own girl.

Mica: It's if you're gonna do this, you're gonna do this, you're gonna do this alone.

Christina: I'm gonna do it by yourself.

Mica: What did your mom think about you being in photography?

Christina: She loved it. My mom didn't have a lot of confidence. They're older. They're now in their mid 80s and my father just passed at 88. When they got married, the type of jobs women had available to them, especially in South Africa, where she was allowed to be a [00:16:00] secretary.

They really liked hiring the Brits because of the accent. My mom didn't have a lot of confidence. My father did not allow her to go to school. She did secretarial school. That was acceptable. Then when he was in South Africa, the goal was to move to another country.

The political unrest in South Africa was really crazy when they were there. They were getting in trouble for being friends with people of other races and things like that. They were shifting laws to where if you were not born there and you wanted to leave the country, you couldn't bring any money with you.

So they were getting ready to shift the law. So then there was this mass exodus of all the Brits leaving South Africa. So that's when dad was like, okay, we got to find another place to go. Let's try the U. S. He wrote a bunch of letters to several companies and the chemical company he ended up [00:17:00] working with sponsored him to move out to the U. S. Dad left South Africa first and then he went to the U. S. first and then mom went back to England for about six months. After he got things set up, then she moved out to the U. S. And there's a lot more to that story about why they were away from each other for that long, but we won't go into that.

Mica: Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I, I love that your mom was like, fully on board. Super supportive. Your mom was like your cheerleader and your supporter and go girl, go, go, go. You could do this. You could do this. I believe in you. That's really cool.

Christina: Yeah, yeah, she, she always was and and, and still is, of course.

Mica: When you talked about how you would like, wait like a week or two for your film to come in the mail. I tell this to my nieces and nephew all the time. I'm like, you have no idea how blessed you are right now because you could take a picture and see the [00:18:00] instant results, but for us like we had to go wait in line. Turn in our film and then wait. And then go pick it up and then we'd find out if whether or not this thing was in focus.

Christina: And that's the thing you had to make sure it was in focus. You know in days of film, it was really stressful. Geez, I was thinking back on this earlier my film bill. I use Sammy's camera in Los Angeles, right? So all my film would be coming from Sammy's camera.

An average year would be 20 or 30 thousand dollars in film. I shot food, which means, we don't really burn a lot of frames. If you were shooting fashion or people, your film bill at the end of the year, would have been at least I don't know fifty, hundred thousand dollars, And that was just the film part.

We needed Polaroid. That was how we pre visualized what we were doing. Was shooting Polaroid. The first ten years was always large format. So four by five film.[00:19:00] And geez, some months just my Polaroid bill was like 5,000 dollars just for Polaroid. But you bill it out, when you're doing your estimates, you knew, okay for each shot that I'm being hired to do, just the film cost, I'm billing them out at 300 dollars. Just for one shot. So that's covering the film, the Polaroid, and the processing, because I would usually run like five sheets of film. on a shot. You shoot two normals, you bracket, right?

You shoot two normals and then you shoot two overs and two unders. And then you run one normal at the lab. We all had our own little formulas, right? So I was shooting Fujin Velvia. Quite a bit for food. It was really a beautiful, warm film. You underexpose a wee bit and then you push it.

So like that, like in days of film, your style and technique came from how you ran your film, you know how you processed it, what film you used. What lab you used and all of that.

So I had my little formula down and I wouldn't run everything if I didn't [00:20:00] need to, so that's how I would keep costs down. So if I nailed it on my normal exposure shot, I might run the other one as a backup, because again, we only have that one piece of film. So you need a backup. It was just a whole nother whole nother world of shooting.

And you had to have multiple sets up at the same time. While you're running film on that set, now we work on set number two, and then as we're working on that one, the assistant goes out and picks up the film for set number one because you had to rush it, which means the film's going to be done in an hour and a half.

Your whole day is scheduling around running your film, getting your first sheets back to double check your exposure. And then depending on what happened with that shot your client is there with you, right? There's no virtual shooting at all.

You go to the light table. We're looking at the film And then it's okay, yeah, I think we're, we're happy with this. Now we're going to strike this and move on to the, [00:21:00] to the next. This is a slow process. It was very, it was a very slow process.

Mica: Such a different world back then with, with digital, it's like spray and pray. That's what I call it.

Christina: Exactly.

Mica: Spray

Christina: know.

Mica: and pray. And with, film, it's like you have, this finite amount of shots and so you really have to be intentional with everything that you're doing.

Christina: And imagine every time you press the shutter, that just cost you money, man. Every frame that you shoot is costing you money.

Mica: Oh my gosh so you better be sure.

Christina: You better be sure about it. And if someone's paying you to do that, that pressure is ten times. And, stuff happens, right? I remember running film at the lab and the power went out at the lab. I assisted a lot [00:22:00] and I learned these techniques of running and, and production.

It's really production is what we're talking about. That's why you never, ever run all your film at the same time. Cause it's called the soup. Where the film is going into the machine, it's called the soup. And so they're like, dude, if your film gets stuck in the soup, then it's trashed.

Mica: No, oh no, that would be the worst.

Christina: And I've had, I've had that happen. I can't even tell you how many times and it's not the lab's fault. They just had a power failure or a machine broke down, and they have to hand crank stuff out. The machines are automated, but then when they have a power failure, they can literally hand crank, hand turn the machines to get the film out of it.

But it's not going to be consistent. You're going to have chemical marks on it and stuff like that. So that's why I really loved shooting sheet film and you never ran it all at the same time. So you had backups, backups, backups, backups. I [00:23:00] never lost film on a job. Ever. Even though machines went down or one machine even ate it.

It was like at the bottom of the machine and they couldn't get it out.

You have to, have to, have to have your backups. I remember, when digital was just first coming on, there are some friends of mine, they were product shooters and they were doing this type of lifestyle product photography with people. They had shot almost the full day without doing a backup and they lost everything.

I remember they were reaching out to fellow FOTOGs like, Hey, I've heard of this thing called data rescue. Do you know of any companies that do that? Again, this is like beginning of digital era, right? So there was a company in San Francisco that could try to pull data off of drives, but they charged like 20,000 dollars to do it.

Oh my God. And this is a big advertising job that [00:24:00] the people were paid considerably, so that's what they did. Also, we had insurance for these things back then. What we still do now, you should now. If something goes wrong with your gear or whatever, and you lose data you should have insurance to protect you against that.

You might have to do a reshoot for free, it's not the client's fault. If your gear goes down that your client shouldn't have to pay for that and stuff. So I totally remember my friends telling me that story and I was like, okay, I used to back up at the end of every shot digitally.

So I, I changed it to where just I got a computer software was brand new at the time where it was constantly backing up onto a hard drive that was sitting on the desk, right? This is way before cloud computing was even happening. Everything we did had to be on CDs or drives, hard drives, and stuff like that.

I'm still carting around [00:25:00] archives of this stuff because it's like, it's client work and I don't want to throw it out. So I've, I just carted around. It's up in storage. Then it was a big deal when, when DVDs came out, we could burn on DVDs and get more data onto.

So instead of a job being like five CDs, we could burn it on a DVD. Come on.

Mica: Yeah, oh my gosh it's, it's crazy to think of what life was like before digital and what it's like now.

Christina: Yeah, it's amazing now.

That was a serious challenge because in the beginning we did not know the files that we were writing digitally at that time. We did not know if they were future proofed. We had no idea that we would be able to read them in the future, like many, many years from now.

That's when they came out with the digital, the DNG, the digital negative. And that is supposed to be [00:26:00] future proof, industry standard. Everybody should be able to open up a DNG file. And because it's a digital negative, you have access to that raw data, right?

Each camera has their own raw file formula, right? So that's not future proofed probably.

But I remember my retouchers, we would have these conversations and they would be like, Hey CP, I know you're giving me TIFF files, but I want us to work with DNGs, digital negatives. Anything can open it, and I was shooting with a Phase One Digital Back.

Christina: So that was creating its own type of raw file format. And so yeah, we were basically working in DNGs when I was working with certain retouchers just because of that.

Mica: One thing I loved learning about you is, how you assisted so many different photographers and like different niches. You said that in the two years that you were assisting, you [00:27:00] assisted over 35 photographers. And I was like what?

Christina: Oh yeah. And many more very regularly. Not every photographer is created equally and not every photographer is nice. Hence the 35.

Mica: What stood out? Was there a specific shoot that stood out to you? What do you remember about that shoot?

Christina: Sticking out to me as far as carving my career? Or?

Mica: Had a assisting that like had an impact on you as a photographer?

Christina: There's so many. What I chose to do was work with photographers who work I technically admired and they did big production. Cause going to school, you don't learn how to do production when you're in school. I wanted to just learn all of the back part, the behind the scenes of running a photo shoot.

I still feel to this day, the only way you can do that is by assisting somebody else. You're not going to get this off of YouTube.

British people [00:28:00] tend to, my parents, I'll just say so I'm not offending a lot of people who are Brits, but, my British parents never spoke their mind. They never were straight with their feelings and you had to read between the lines. So I am excellent at reading people because of how these two people were with each other. It drove me nuts. It was actually nice getting out of the house at such a young age to not have to walk on eggshells every day.

Let's see who's pissed off at each other today. It was just exhausting.

Mica: Analyze the sentences. I'm like, okay, you said that, but did you mean that?

Christina: Exactly. And we're like, I know you didn't mean that. I know you mean just the opposite because of the tone you just used. So it really taught me how to read people very, very well. So moving forward to when I was assisting, let's just say that some of the photographers I worked for were not as aware as maybe they should have been with their clients.

I'm like [00:29:00] very empathic. I pick up when someone's really angry or upset because that was my survival mechanism as a kid. I had to really read the room. I can just walk into a room and I know exactly what's going on in there.

So the photographer would do or say something and the client would be enraged, and didn't even know how to. And I'd be like, Oh my God, how is the photographer not picking up on this? Then I would sort of like go over to the photographer and just be like, Hey, so yeah. Remember when you said that saying?

Maybe there was a different way that they were thinking about it, too. So I became like a little translator, I guess is what I'm getting at. Especially if the photographer actually was a good person, but they just weren't too aware of things in their environment. So I became the interpreter.

Some photographers, bless their hearts, they're terribly shy and they're not good with people. Again, this is in the era where [00:30:00] everything happened in studio, and if it didn't, then there was like phone calls and conversations that had to happen. Then things inevitably would have to get reshot if they now see the image and they're like, Oh my God, that's totally not what I had in mind.

So things like that. When I was assisting, I picked up so many things with how to work with the client, how to run a studio, how to treat your crew. All these things that makes a business successful. Let's even just take photography out of it, right? I waitressed a lot when I had to move out.

I worked in three different restaurants pretty much all the time. And I also worked in a one hour film lab. And so just witnessing interactions with management, with staff, with the customers, there's a great way to do business and there's really bad ways to do a business. Keeping all of that in mind so that when a photographer is being asked [00:31:00] by a client to do something extra and then that photographer isn't good at vocalizing yo, man, that wasn't on our contract. We didn't agree to that. They can't be straight about it. And now they're angry but they're doing it, but they shouldn't be doing it.

They should be charging more for it. Again, days of film, very expensive mistake. So I'm like, just have a conversation. What the? And now you just set a precedent with that client and they do it again. Cause you're letting them.

You have to be your own advocate and you have to warn the client. Listen, it's like I have been art directed horribly, meaning the art direction choice was awful. Not good colors. They had something in their mind that they wanted and it's not going to agree with your aesthetic and it might not look good.

Sadly, a lot of jobs I shot that were [00:32:00] completely controlled and creative directed or art directed to something I would never show in my portfolio. I'm showing them my portfolio, this style and look, and then they're art directing me to put down a flaming yellow tablecloth with some brown food that looks god awful. Things like that.

And then sometimes when I get asked to do something that I I personally don't agree with, with aesthetically, then I will ask them if I could do my version as well. And I don't charge them extra for that shot up front. The understanding is, and this is written into the contract, if the photographer wants to do a variation for herself it's not going to charge, not going to cost you extra unless you want to use that in replace of what we shot. You're paying me to do four or five images. Let's say we do five images and then I do a variation of one [00:33:00] and you like that better. And oftentimes that's really what would end up happening. Then they can take my variation as part of that final mix. And I make sure we don't go into overtime when I am suggesting a variation or a change on set that wasn't necessarily art directed that way. So you really have to read the room and figure out they, they say it's a collaboration, but how much of it It really is a collaboration.

Do they just want me to be the trigger person? They just want to literally noodle that spoon on set 900 times and I'm taking pictures and then I got to shut this down because we need to start working on our next shot.

Mica: It's look, we've gotten 300 pictures of this spaghetti shot. Can we?

Christina: Yeah. We've now covered this shot with the spoon in 900 locations. I think we got it. I think it's safe to move on now. You're going to have to [00:34:00] commit, move it on, and I will, I will joke around like that too on set.

Mica: You mentioned earlier that that like assisting helped you see the back end, like how photography businesses are run and that, even today, that's really the best way to get to know the business. For photographers who are so very new what's the best way to approach a photographer? Should they learn a few things first and then start assisting, or should they just dive right in and let the photographer know, Hey, I'm really wet behind the ears, but I'm a, I'm a fast learner.

I will pick up, just give me a chance.

Christina: There's many different ways to go about this. And depending on your level of expertise with equipment you got to look at this as a business as well. An assisting business. You [00:35:00] got to like put it out there. I can't stand it when someone reaches out to me and they're like, let me shadow you for a day.

That's offensive. That means you don't want to do anything. You want to see what I'm doing.

Mica: You want to see what I'm doing and you want to copy what I'm doing.

Christina: And you want to copy what I'm doing? No. I've never let anyone shadow me. When I'm working bigger productions and we need someone, so you have your first assistant, second assistant, third assistant, and then you have PAs, production assistants. That's like the hierarchy. The first assistant is like your right, right hand man, second assistant, they know almost as much as the first.

Third assistant, they're still green, they're still learning, but they have been on set, they have experience. And then we have production assistants. If you aren't a part of an organization like an APA or an ASMP or PPA, if you can't find anything like that in your area, then you're going to be trying to find photographers who would use you as a production assistant type of [00:36:00] person where you don't have responsibility.

You're not gonna be picking up cameras and shooting second shooting on set. You're not gonna be doing anything like that. But I would really suggest to start going through a photo organization because photo organizations, they're there to help everybody at every level.

They're going to have programs like the APA has an assisting program in Los Angeles. They have an assisting bootcamp. It's, it was, it's phenomenal. I was on one of the panels there and it was like a two day boot camp. Teaching photographers how to assist. When I get people who are emailing me asking to assist me, and then I go to their website, there's no information about them being an assistant. They want to be a food shooter. So I know immediately that this person just wants to see what I'm doing and working on, which is fine. I get that.

But if you want to assist someone, you better have information on your website [00:37:00] about being an assistant. What I suggest is just to set up a landing page with free software about you being an assistant. Photographers want to know what equipment you're familiar with, the brands. We also need to know what level of equipment do you know?

Do you know the pro gear or not? Don't pretend. This is not a fake it till you make it thing for sure. Just be totally straight and honest about your experience, so if you are familiar with digital backs and large format systems, medium format systems, you're going to have a huge advantage over those that don't.

Depending on the type of photographer that you're approaching like if there's somebody like me that we're using medium format systems we're using pretty high end strobe equipment and things like that. We need people who know how to use that gear especially with the high end strobe packs.

That's a lot of wattage and if you use it incorrectly, you could blow your hand off.

Mica: Oh, my gosh.

Christina: Can't have that happen. There's safety things on set when you're dealing with that type of equipment for sure. Yeah, [00:38:00] just look at it as a business. What I did for myself was I knew I wanted to be a shooter.

I didn't want to become a professional photo assistant. When I was working on set with several bigger photographers that had many assistants, I would approach the freelance first assistants and say, Hey, I really like working with you. If you ever need a second or a third on any of your other jobs, please let me know.

I would love that because the photographers, when our main people can't work for us, we ask them to find someone to replace themselves. Like we ask for referrals. Once you get into that world of photo assisting, you're going to get referred out. The other way that we find really good assistants is through equipment rental houses.

If you wanted to learn, seriously, you want to learn a lot, you work for an equipment rental house for a few months, you're going to learn about every piece of equipment. That information will stay [00:39:00] with you the rest of your life. I never worked at a at an equipment rental house. But I had several of my photo assistant friends that did.

We would literally talk about what new equipment came in, weird stuff that would happen with some of the packs on set. It was great. I learned so much from my friends that actually worked at rental houses. So yeah, I hope that sort of broke it down.

If you really have never assisted before, approach an organization, see what they have to offer. And there's always photographers who are members of these organizations who are very supportive of new photographers and they have like a rotating program in their studio every year of new production assistants and stuff like that.

I even had a few assistants in LA. Because I was renting my friend's photo studio because mine wasn't big enough, and he had basically a paid intern in his studio, but she was interested in shooting [00:40:00] food. So when I was renting his space, my friend Anthony, so Anthony's like, Hey, I have a young photographer, from, cause he was teaching classes as well. He was like, I got a young photographer. She's going to be an intern. Are you cool with her being there on your day? It'd be really lovely for her to see how a food shoot goes cause she's never seen one before.

She was awesome. And she was really good already as an assistant. So then I started hiring her as a second or third assistant on future jobs. Just from that one connection from Anthony.

Mica: Wow. It really is such a small world. Especially in Austin. And I've had photographers or people who wanted to assist me reach out reach out to me And they're like if you ever need you know, I'll do it for free and I'm like, ah First of all, I pay my crews so.

Christina: So many photographers took advantage of the free internship. And my friend, Anthony always paid his [00:41:00] people just to get that clear. I remember when I was assisting, I, there's a couple of photographers who did huge jobs and I really wanted to see how they ran production, but you weren't allowed to work for them and get paid for the first six months.

You had to be a free intern. Seriously, it was unbelievable. And that is no longer legal in Los Angeles because of the abuse that happened with that, like free crew. And these were on huge jobs. So this guy was making at least $10,000 a day as a fee, plus all of the expenses and things like that.

And you're not gonna pay your production assistant like a hundred dollars a day. Dude w w w what? They kept calling me and I'm like, Oh my God, so and so just called and they'd be like, know the rules, you have to work for free. And I was like, no. I, why would I do that?

I can, I can work for a number of photographers at a first [00:42:00] photo assistant pay rate. Like why would I do that? Why would I work for free for you? Well, you're going to be working for so and so. Yeah. No. So I never, I never worked for the guy. Never worked for the guy.

Mica: That makes total sense. The photographers who did reach out and did offer to assist for free, like I automatically tell them like, first of all, I hope you haven't messaged any other photographer offering to do this for free. Because you should be getting paid for your work. Don't offer for free. You need to be paid for your time. You need to be paid for your work. If you set the precedent that, hey, I will do free work, then it will be very hard to get someone to pay you for your work.

Once you set that boundary, then it's, it's done.

Christina: And the other thing too that they don't understand as well, if they aren't being paid, there's no workman's comp involved. If they get hurt on the job, then the photographer will literally get sued by the state for workman's comp. So you can't work [00:43:00] for free. Ever. It's just not a good idea, especially if the photographer's running strobe packs and stuff like that.

Mica: Yeah, I don't want my hand getting blown off, and I don't want anybody else's hands getting blown off.

Christina: Yeah. And in our food world, sometimes my assistants would help in the kitchen a little bit. They might be washing knives and handling hot pans and things like that. We can get hurt in our food world.

Mica: I used to work in a physical therapy clinic and, a lot of of our patients that came in, they were dealing with work related injuries.

Some of the companies that they worked for, they were like, we don't want to involve our insurance company, so we're just going to do self pay. We don't want to raise our premiums, we don't want to raise our rates. And then they, they were shocked by how much it would cost. And I'm like you're doing self pay.

And I think, the fact that your employee lost a finger, it's the least you could do.

Christina: Yeah, that's why. That's why we have laws about that, to protect, [00:44:00] protect people. I work for a lot of photographers who tried to get away with not making me an employee. And this is another thing I learned during my little two year stint as a photo assistant. I didn't know about workman's comp.

I had no clue. No one had taught me that stuff. I'm working with a photographer, there's one photographer, and he's making me sign this weird document that says, I'm a 1099 employee contract laborer. And if I get hurt on the job, he's not responsible. and I was like, wait a minute. So I said to him, I was like, hold on.

So if you have me go up on a ladder, I fall off a ladder and break something. You're saying that you're not going to help me with that? No, you're not an employee. So he was incorrect and wrong. All photo assistants are employees and you're going to have photographers that will argue with you about [00:45:00] this.

Another reason why I worked for so many different photographers, I would work for them one time and learn how they treated people, how they ran their productions. And it was just like, hell no, I am not going to get involved with this person again. With photographers like that, who maybe they, they booked me and then they try to get me to sign an agreement on the shoot day.

What am I going to do? Walk out? I probably should have. But I didn't. I caved in and I signed the agreement. And then I would just literally mail them information about workman's comp and all of that afterwards. And I would send that in with my invoice. And I'd be like, here you go. And what you're doing is not legal, dude.

Laughter.

Mica: I worked in theater and I was so naive when I went into working freelance, I thought I was going to be doing like all these big like productions and yada, yada, yada. And I found myself working for a lot of like [00:46:00] small mom and pop theaters. There was one show where it was like water it was there was a scene where It's like it's raining and so

Christina: Oh my God, so much liability with that.

Mica: So much it's so

Christina: Was an attorney in a previous life because I'm like, I immediately go down that road.

Mica: It's so like they had a live band and there were like monitors and and so like we're setting this all up and the stage manager is telling me what my job was to do and I was just like looking at her and I was like, I don't want to do this. She's like, well, you know, this is what we hired you to do.

And I was like I guess you're going to have to fire me because I don't want to get electrocuted. This is a lot of electronics and you have actors on stage and I'm like, I saw Pet Cemetery. Part two. I know what happened to that actress. I'm not trying to get electrocuted.

I was like, y'all are crazy. They ended up having me do a different job. But then, looking back [00:47:00] on it years later, it could have really gone wrong. I could have really got and I didn't know any better. If I hadn't spoken up for myself and said, I really don't want to do this, and I don't feel comfortable doing this, imagine the kind of Danger.

I was putting myself in. And so it's just scary. So like assisting all of the, all of these different photographers, that's how you found your way into food photography.

What was it about food photography that stood out more than all of the other genres and niches?

Christina: What I really liked most about working on the food jobs was it took patience. It was a much slower pace and really detail oriented. Not that other types of shooting aren't, but, I absolutely hated the fashion stuff. I only did a few assisting jobs with that. I don't have that attitude or temperament to deal with that.

And I don't like how people are treated on a lot of those sets, at least the ones that I was on. So the food [00:48:00] world. Pretty much a lot of people working on those jobs are foodies, and I love food. It was fascinating and fun, and seeing what the food stylists did was just always amazing to me.

What they could do with certain foods and, and how they could turn something look like brown mush into something really fantastic. So I love that aspect of it. And prop styling and seeing what the prop stylists would do and how they did their job. It just really clicked for me.

I was like, okay, this is this is what I'm resonating with. And I, and I would not have figured that out, or maybe I would have, but it probably would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out had I not done assisting. I was working with a lot of photographers who did Los Angeles magazine back in the day.

A lot of food magazines and stuff like that. So I really got to see some beautiful recipes get created and styled. Then lit fully in the studio [00:49:00] as if it was outside and stuff like that. So I, I really clicked with all of those weird things that we have to do as a food shooter.

It's fun.

Mica: What's a misconception that people have about food photography still after all these years?

Christina: I'm sure you've experienced this too, but when you're working with a new client, they always say, all of this for one shot? And it's like, yeah, dude, yeah, we need a lot of food. Where don't get stingy on me now and only give me one pie if we're going to photograph a pie. I need like 10 pies, don't be stingy like

Mica: Hey, there's

Christina: Yeah. So I don't think that people realize or they think that we're miracle workers. That we can just take this one tiny little amount of food and make it somehow spread and, and get bigger. And then just become this beautiful thing. It's a collaboration.

It takes a lot of [00:50:00] talent and a food stylist, ideally a prop stylist, if you have the budget, and then our photography knowledge and lighting. So when we're working with clients who, haven't hired pros before. That's the biggest education that we need to do is to basically totally enroll them in the idea of, yeah, you want it to look like it does on my website.

There's a price for that. And it's going to take some time and some resources and People. Staff.

Mica: There's a lot of hand holding. I assisted on a shoot where it was like a pizza shoot and we went through, gosh almost a hundred to a hundred pizzas. It was a two day shoot. I told my friends and they were like, that's a lot of pizza.

So I'm like well, the more people on an agency's team you have. Let's say you have eight people, that's eight different opinions and you got to please eight people. And if one person doesn't like how one pepperoni looks guess what? You got to scrap it. And [00:51:00] do it again.

And it can be pretty tedious because of how many people are involved.

Christina: Yeah, that always comes to play. And when I do work with the larger crews like that, larger productions I make it very clear in the beginning, we need to have one person on set that is controlling the creative. And I explained to them, I know you've been on set with five of you or six of you, and while you're arguing about this or that, the food's dying. It's not an efficient way to shoot.

Now, there will be times where you're just going to have agency people butt heads, and again, when they walk into the studio, I'm like picking up the vibes. Like, okay, what type of crew do we have here? Do they like each other? Is there animosity and stuff like that? And then when there's animosity and there's egos battling out like creative director versus art director, that happens a lot.

Then that's when I will, basically be like, okay, listen, we'll shoot it your way and then we'll shoot it your way if it's not a huge deal. And then y'all [00:52:00] can figure this and you can have this fight outside the studio. We got to move on. It's to appease the argument.

I'm not gonna have the argument in the studio anymore. Y'all can do this after here. We're gonna shoot it this way. We're gonna shoot it that way Move on. Like just I'm not gonna charge you extra for it Yeah, you're going to pick one of them, so I'm not going to charge you extra for it. Stop being 12 years old and figure it out. Like someone wants to be the winner, you know, and it's like, Oh God, okay.

Mica: I want to talk about your kaleidoscope of food series. And I think that'll be a nice way to, to, to close out. One thing I, I loved is that, you talked about how this series is a celebration of what nature has given us from the earth and from the oceans.

You mentioned that your commercial work took you away from why you got into shooting food in the first place. So I wanted to hear more about that and about the series. What you love about it. And how it [00:53:00] pushed you and challenged you as an artist.

Christina: Yeah, so I've always done fine art photography while doing commercial work. I think it's important that you do have. The kaleidoscope of food came out of that. I actually started doing it in days of film with four by five film because it's so easy to shoot multiples of film, flip them, rotate them, and then re photograph them.

So that, that's actually how it started. With the digital era, it just became 30 times easier. And so it was really just like, first read of a lot of the kaleidoscopes is just bright, colorful textures. And then when you get deeper into it, then you realize that's cauliflower or that's octopus or whatever.

Mica: I like the scallion snowflake. I thought that was so cool.

Christina: Yeah. So that was really just playing with food and it's beautiful to begin with, but then turning it into this other thing that's also really beautiful. That's really what that was all about because my commercial work was so hardcore advertising and it was really [00:54:00] far removed from photographing food that just came out of the field.

It was really far from that. So my kaleidoscope work I would go to the farmer's markets and I would buy whatever beautiful things inspired me. And then I would come back to the studio and do still life work with it. In some of the still life work would be portfolio pieces.

Some of those became components of the kaleidoscope stuff. It's really just sort of a reminder of where our food really does originate from and celebrating that.

Mica: I love that. I love that. You mentioned about like portfolio work and I just push that so much to new photographers, just photographers. And I just tell them, your portfolio work is the playground. That's the commercial work, your advertising work. That's, that's your classroom.

My last question for you is or second to last actually, is what has been, the most rewarding part of, of that educational [00:55:00] journey for you?

Christina: I recognize that with having the experience I did working for so many different photographers, it really, really gave me an advantage over a lot of my competitors when I was starting out. I worked with a lot of photographers who were really sincere and supportive. I'm still good friends with a few of them to this day, even though it was like 30 years ago, actually 35 years ago, it was a long time ago.

I always just hoped that I could be that for someone else because, God, I worked for so many photographers who were just like, not nice. They were so like, pretty mean. So for me with the club, it was definitely about, there's so much bad information out there, incorrect information. People feel that now they don't need to have an education to do photography. [00:56:00] And I can't imagine my world if I, without my my education that I have. So I want the club to be a resource for people where they know, first of all, I didn't just pick up a camera yesterday, so I have a little bit of experience with it, and I can just give them my experience. Let them know this is what I have experience personally.

This is what I went through. Just hopefully making it quicker for people to figure out what should be the next step for them in their photo career. Learning photography is extremely hard. You're learning technical things. You're learning business. You're learning artistic stuff.

And you're learning how to work with people, random strangers sometimes. These are a lot of skills and it takes time to navigate that. So I always just say to people who are just starting out, you're not going to learn all the things at one time. It's not possible. It's [00:57:00] overwhelming.

You're going to get burnt out. You're going to get confused. And you're just going to want to drop it. it's not going to serve anyone if that happens. So you got to just focus on one thing at a time. With the club, with the things I really always talk about, you have to determine who the clients are that you want to shoot for first.

So I teach things very differently from a lot of people. Instead of just go out, shoot everything that you can, shoot what you want and do that. That's great. That's on the side, but you have to flip it. You have got to know who you're targeting and then you build a body of work that's going to get that person.

It's 10 times easier when you think of it this way. I can always tell when I'm working with a photographer who was in a program and they did the random assignments and these random assignments become their portfolio. There's no integration, there's no flow, it literally is a book of assignments. [00:58:00] That's not going to get you work.

You have to have a consistent look and feel. You have to know exactly who you're going after. Once you determine that, then it makes it really a lot easier to make a portfolio that will attract that, that target market that you're going after.

Mica: One thing you mentioned about like programs they teach you how to be a photographer, but they don't teach you how to be a photographer, like the business side of it. I feel like my education at, because I, I got associates in photography as well. I feel like that was like step one. Oftentimes, I've noticed that these educational programs at least in an institution, is that they guarantee that when you're done with our program, you're going to leave a photographer. And I think that that's misleading. I feel like this is step one. You've learned the foundations and the basics of how to be a photographer. And now the next step of your education, [00:59:00] whether it be assisting or whether you get a mentorship with another experienced photographer, like that's the next step, but you're not going to just launch straight into photography right after this.

Christina: We're definitely not. it is a profession that I believe needs to be with, do it with apprenticing and have an apprenticeship. But people don't want to do that now. They just want the quick fix. They go to YouTube, they think they can get all their answers there or maybe they buy a random course here and there, and then they have no idea what they don't know yet. So then they do a job and then it goes horribly and then they're like, Oh my God, what, what? It's

Mica: It's like, this is what it's like. I don't want to do this. Ah, ah. So my, my last question for you. What do you hope people learn from today's episode and where can they follow you and support you and learn from you?

Christina: Hopefully with today's episode if you haven't tried assisting or working with [01:00:00] someone else before, maybe this could inspire you to do that. It's incredibly fun and you get to see how other people do things. It's so valuable. It's just, it's a great, it's a great, I can't promote it more.

You can follow me on Food Photography Blog and also of course the Food Photography Club. I also have a Facebook group with over 6, 000 members in there where we just, people just go in and ask questions about food photography. I'm in there every day.

Mica: Oh man, I can't thank you enough for being a guest on this show. I loved everything about this conversation. I feel like I could talk to you for 20, 000 years about life and family and photography. I am picking up what you are putting down.

So thank you so much for being on the show.

Christina: Oh, and thank you so much. It's been great talking and remembering all these things about way back when.

Mica: Thank you again for being [01:01:00] on the show and for being the most amazing human being on the planet. Yay.

Christina: I appreciate it very much. And I think it's important what you're doing to support other photographers as well. It's awesome.