Big Hatt Gourmet | Txoko Dos

We both love food. We both love photography. Why not mix the two?!

Event and Food Photography

Last Saturday Josh and I had the awesome opportunity to work with Chicago Chef Craig Bell and his Big Hatt Gourmet team at the Subzero-Wolf showroom in the Merchandise Mart to shoot the food served at their Txoko Dos dinner event (for which I also did the invitation and menu design)! The Txoko dinner series is unique to Chef Bell in particular as it is inspired by his time in the Basque country of Spain, and this influence is represented in every dish. Check out the mouth watering menu here!. As if the food wasn’t sinful enough, each course was paired with organic Koval whiskey, local to Chicago, based in Ravenswood. Koval is the first distillery in Chicago since prohibition and was opened by Robert Birnecker and his wife in 2008. Kelly, the Koval rep, mixed the cocktail of the night labeled Black Thorn which incorporated a berry syrup made by Chef Bell 5 years ago in Basque country. An amazing compliment to some fantastic food. In addition to the seven courses served, there were appetizers which included the best deviled egg I’ve ever had! Perfectly creamy and whipped with generous truffle flavor and the added crunch of salty sweet bacon brittle to top it off. We’re hoping these photos do the flavors justice!

The Technical

This image set represents our first foray into the wonderful, tasty, macro world of food photography! We spent the whole week researching and self-teaching a few tricks of the trade. For the technical geeks, we used the Canon 6D and paired it to an iPAD using its onboard wifi. This was an awesome workflow so we could see the fine details of the photos instantly on a large screen. We primarily used the Canon 24-105mm f/4.0 macro lens. Food photography isn’t too different from people; the goal is to make the subject matter look as beautiful as possible and lighting is a big part of that.