This is always weird to me…my whole site is written in first person and that writing about ‘who I am’ in 3rd person seem to formal. I’ll start with the basics…

I’m from the east coast, born just outside of Philadelphia. Traveled around Europe and the Middle East a lot when I was a kid. We settled back in Philadelphia when I was a teenager, which is when I got my first job as a dishwasher. Soon after I was working the pantry. It was then I fell in love with food and the way it made people feel. I became obsessed with evoking those same emotions from people with my food.

I graduated high school and though I wanted to be a writer, my grades would preclude me from a proper college education. I had the attitude but not the aptitude. So in 1990 I went to culinary school in NY. I graduated, packed up the car and headed west where I ended up in Denver. I’ve cooked on the West coast and I’ve worked at a prestigious hotel in Europe but I always came back to Denver. This is where I’ve been able to marry my love of food and cooking with my love of writing.

The photography is recent and not so recent, let me explain. I bought an Epson PhotoPC 700 color digital camera for about $400-$500 in 1999, my first camera. The purpose was to document my dishes at my first Executive Chef post. The pictures were never meant to be artistic or viewed by anybody but me, a visual diary of my menus. Over the years I’ve used various point and shoots without a thought to white balance, lighting, color, camera settings. A couple of years ago, while taking a photo in macro mode, I hit upon a photo that I thought rivaled photos I had seen in professional and consumer magazines. I tried for weeks to reproduce it. When I couldn’t, I figured it was the cameras fault. I bought a different one, this one with more megapixels, now I was sure I could take better photos. When it didn’t happen for a while again, I started reading…

Apparently what I needed was a dSLR to get these fabulous photos. So I bought a Nikon D60. While it had all these auto settings, I read that to have control over the camera and get the photos I wanted, I had to know how to use all these new buttons and dials, what they did, how they related to each other, I felt this was going to be a pain and what was I getting my self into. But the more I read and experimented and used the camera, the more I became addicted to it.

I made myself shoot in manual from the get go, for the first month I wanted to throw the camera away every time I pulled it out. Slowly, it began to make sense and today, I can’t shoot in anything but manual.

To make a long story short, I’m not a food photographer, I’m a chef who likes to take pictures of food. Some are good, some are bad, but I see myself getting better every day and I’m ok with that…at least for now.

This site is my way of sharing with you two of the things I am passionate about. I do hope you will enjoy.

C-