Wild Blue Co-Owner and Executive Chef Alex Chen.
Fine Dining
Wild Blue is a fairly new restaurant in Whistler and so far they’ve taken the resort and the country by storm, rated Whistler’s finest restaurant and named as one of the top 50 restaurants in North America.
The Araxi Restaurant signature dish, the miso-marinated sablefish.
Ill Caminetto Executive Chef Mark McLoughlin cooks the lobster and saffron spaghettoni.
Mark, the Executive Chef at Ill Caminetto, invited me into the kitchen to photograph him cooking the spaghettoni. It took about five minutes to do it from scratch, so I barely got any shots.
Dessert at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler.
I shot this about nine months ago at the Fairmont Hotel, but when I checked the IPTC data on the photo, it was blank. My bad, and a good reason why you need to keep your notes up to date. That’s why it now lives as dessert.
Casual Dining – Whistler’s Best Hamburgers
Karen Roland, owner of Roland’s Pub and old friend of mine, holds the signature Roland’s Burger.
Nicklaus North Table 19 restaurant server Emma Horn with the signature T-19 Burger.
The Nita Lake Lodge Lakeside Burger.
The best part of this assignment was getting to eat all the hamburgers. I’m allergic to seafood, so my assistant got to eat fine dining dishes.
Faces – Whistler Local Profiles
Location scouts Meredith and Kevin Hodder near one of their favourite Whistler locations along the Cheakamus River at House Rock.
Audain Art Museum Director & Chief Curator Dr. Curtis Collins in the museums storage vaults and crate room.
Curtis took me into a back room at the Audain Art Museum that was crammed with art not on display and asked if anything in here would work for a photo?
Event organizer Christine Cogger near her home in Pemberton.
Tech Stuff
All the photos were shot with Nikon Z6 cameras and either a 24-120mm f/4 S, a 35mm f/1.8 S, or 85mm f/1.8 S. Most of the portraits were lit with a Godox AD-200 Pro with a medium sized Chimera soft box.
The food photos are by far the most complex work I do. The food close-ups are lit with a Godox AD-600Pro as the main light, with a Godox AD-200 Pro as the fill light to control shadows and contrast. I had another AD-200 mounted in a aluminium snoot, kind of a funnel looking thing with an opening about two inches across. This gives a very hard and direct light which I use to give the food some specular highlights. The dessert shot from the Fairmont was shot with just the snoot, which has a very distinct look. The unit I use came from Amazon and cost about twenty bucks.
With the portrait of Chef Alex Chen at Wild Blue, I had to turn the light down to 1/256th power, as low as it goes, to balance out the background of the very low key lighting in the restaurant. The exposure was 1/8th of a second at f/1.8 with the camera set at ISO 1600. One thing about the Z6 cameras is since they only have a 24MB sensor, they have some of the best low light performance of any modern camera on the market. Focusing it in that light is a whole other issue, but I get by.
The photos of Chef Mark in the kitchen were with the 35mm f/1.8 at about 3200 ISO with just the available light, as were the photos of Curtis the curator of the Audain. With the 35mm and 85mm primes, I leave them wide open at f/1.8 pretty much all the time. If you’re going to stop them down to f/4 or something, you might as well just shoot with the 24-120mm.