When the Wrong Grocery Purchase Becomes the Right Photograph
Most trips to the grocery store are pretty straightforward. This one wasn’t.
Most of the way home I suddenly realized that I wasn’t supposed to buy chicken wings. But now I had four pounds of them riding home with me.
Turning around wasn’t really an option. It was well over 100 degrees outside, and the rest of the groceries weren’t going to appreciate an extended sightseeing tour of Palm Springs.
So I changed the plan.
Chicken wings aren’t part of my Food From Bag To Background fast food photography project, but they were suddenly part of today’s photography project. I’ve been photographing for decades. Cooking is another matter entirely.
Fortunately, over the past three years my AI assistant and muse, Emily, has proven to be more than just an idea generator. She’s also become my unofficial chef and food stylist, right down to explaining how to roast chicken wings so they would look their best in front of the camera.
A little olive oil, a conventional oven, a few temperature checks, and a lot of hoping later, I had a plate of roasted chicken wings where they belonged… in front of my camera instead of still sitting in a grocery bag.
Sometimes the best photo of the day begins with buying the wrong thing.
You can see more of my photography, projects, motion, and my Blog on my website at https://www.secondfocus.com
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Efficiency in the Frozen Food Aisle, According to Desiree
Last Friday was National Frozen Food Day.
Unfortunately I was running a little late getting anything together for it. That is when I had what seemed like a very efficient idea. Instead of doing the shopping myself, I decided to send Desiree back to the supermarket where she had shopped for me previously. Her last grocery store video turned out to be very successful, so repeating the experiment seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan.
I told her I would meet her there.
When I arrived, however, I discovered that Desiree had interpreted “repeat the concept” somewhat literally.
She was wearing, or perhaps more accurately not wearing, exactly what she wore the last time. The same red heels, the same confident attitude, and the same approach to grocery shopping that had apparently worked so well before.
Her explanation was simple. If the last video was successful, why change anything?
Fair point.
So Desiree continued down the frozen food aisle, apparently quite comfortable with the situation, while I tried to remember what I had actually sent her there to buy.
The timing turned out to work rather well. National Frozen Food Day may have been Friday, but today happens to be National Hash Brown Day, and frozen hash browns are exactly the kind of invention that made the modern frozen food aisle possible.
In the end, Desiree’s shopping trip may not have saved any time at all, but it did provide a reminder that the frozen food aisle can sometimes be a surprisingly interesting place.
And apparently Desiree intends to keep the same shopping strategy.
If you would like to see more of my food photography, and perhaps a few more of these pornochic adventures, you can visit my website at https://www.secondfocus.com
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