A Behind-The-Scenes Peek At A Cookbook Photo Shoot

What's a cookbook without photos? An old one. When we started publishing cookbooks with New York publishing houses, way back in the late 1990s, almost no cookbook was photographed. Think about the big ones. THE JOY OF COOKING? MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING? Most by Marcella Hazan? Not a photo to be seen. These days, cookbooks HAVE TO be photographed. Readers demand it. There's lots of reasons for that, including the rise of INSTAGRAM and other image-driven social media sites. But facts are facts. And photos are cookbooks. Join us, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, as we give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we create the photos for our (now) thirty-four cookbooks. Here are the segments of this episode: [00:42] The first thing do is decide which recipes to shoot. [03:52] The second is to choose a good photographer. Here's what we mean by "good." [06:46] Next come the props, the styling--what dish holds that braise or grilled entree? It's a more important question than you might imagine. [09:26] Here's the each shot for our cookbooks actually gets created. [11:35] And finally, what's good food photography with good food styling?