As a photographer, I often get to work with a lot of pretty models, but I’m used to it, and as a professional, I would never ever drool over them. However, with this particular photo shoot, I really found it difficult.

My latest models have been making me drool like crazy. The curves on those thighs and legs, their beautiful golden tone and the color on that tender rack of juiciness are all irresistable. All this is set against the rich, warm colors of the backdrop, a beautiful table hand-made from two logs. They’re exactly what I like capturing in my pictures. I’m talking about the barbeque chicken and ribs from Sam’s BBQ restaurant here. It’s a good thing that Sam actually fed us before the shoot, making it the tastiest shoot that I’ve worked on, literally.

Sam’s father opened the restaurant some years ago, and today, it is packed with fun and good food, even on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. That’s because Sam is a brilliant marketeer. He hires in a band on slow nights and is now having professional pictures taken of his food. This was great timing as one of the catalogs is now asking to include his restaurant in their book because others have provided terrible quality pictures. This is such a great opportunity to show off his food and have people drooling for more.

At the end of the shoot, Sam offered me a gift – the beautiful wood table he made for the backdrop. He had heard how much I loved it. What a beautiful piece of art any photographer would appreciate! Thanks Sam!

The past two months has been nothing but a truly humbling experience for us. We have been blogged, reviewed, voted and published. Here are some of our recent delightful encounters that made us blush to no end…

• As of today, we’ve been voted to TOP THREE of the BEST Wedding Photographer in the entire San Francisco Bay Area by San Francisco Chronicle. Help us Capture The Love become #1 !!!

• Queensberry saw our work and they love what they saw!

• Profoto, a high end international professional lighting company interviewed and blogged about us

• James Robinson, a fellow photographer found us via the Profoto Blog and went ahead to interview us

• Our work was published by both Gizmodo AND Engadget at the same time!

• We got into the front cover and numerous pages of the highly successful Nesting Newbies magazine!

• We’ve taught in several highly successful workshops in Santana Row and were requested by Smugmug to be the South Bay’s Smug Leader, proceed to give talks and organize activities for hundreds of local photographers!

We feel really blessed and we’re definitely counting our blessings and appreciate all the support and love we have gotten over the years from everyone!

Very excited to announce the release of the Nesting Newbies, Winter 2010 issue!. This issue’s really cooking!! The food section was shot in Christopher Peacock’s Cabinetry Showroom in San Francisco. Christopher, the English kitchen designer has a client list that includes the Clintons, Mariah Carey, Toni Morrison and the likes. His kitchen won the 2008 Kitchen of the Year!

With great kitchens, should good food be prepared! Along with good food, must great food photography be designed.

Why “design”? Magazine layouts dictate the orientation and composition of each shot. So, thinking and planning with the final design in mind will ensure that the photographs are crafted for the text, design and layout. It is imperative to think 10 steps ahead when it comes to nearly all genre of photography. It’s like playing a good game of chess.

Here we photographed not only most of the food showcased in the magazine (without a food stylist, might I add), but all 10-20 food items in just a few mere hours. Such method of shooting will drive insane all, but the most hardened food photographers.

Here on the left is a brandied tomato cream soup. It is absolutely delicious but REALLY? Soup like these should not be poured into cup this size. It’s such a tease. Plus, I can’t stick my tongue too far into the cup when I’m finished, to lick up the remains.

This is definitely a great magazine that I would read from cover to cover. Well done, team!!

What a super fun weekend!! Over 100+ photographers attended our Photography Made Simple workshop in Maggiano’s Little Italy in Santana Row, San Jose.

Everyone loved the breakfast and lunch!

We got some great comments and emails from the attendees. Here are some great ones,

1. “Michael, the workshop exceeded my expectations. In addition to being very informative, it was also most enjoyable. From the first minute to the very end I was captivated. Thank you” – Trevor Ngo
2. “I especially liked Michael’s philosophy that to make pictures stand out, they have to be taken from the heart, and it shows in his work”…read more – Michelle Ma
3. “It was like 10 years of professional skills of composition, lighting, creative view, crop, portrait demo, to some photoshop retouching techniques packed into an injection. Voila!” …read more… – Dee Lee
4. “I want to give a huge recommendation for Michael’s photography workshops. I took Michael’s portrait and lighting workshop a few weeks ago and it was great! Whether you are just starting out or are an experienced photographer, there is much to be learned from him…”read more… – John Harrison

Here’s a shot of the back of my head, facing my class in Maggiano’s Little Italy, Santana Row, San Jose.

Now, doesn’t it reminds you of this product?

I love good wine, so maybe I sent out a telepathic message to Dominus Estate, the Yountville-based maker of exquisite, velvety Bordeaux-style wines made in the “terroir” style. For those who don’t know, and I certainly didn’t, this traditional mode of wine-making works magic with climate and soil to produce wonderful vintages.

Anyway, Dominus found me, and we quickly agreed to work together. They gave me three bottles-two to photograph and one to pour from—and a beautiful etched decanter to use in the shots. I loved the decanter, because it does such a great job of showing off the lovely deep purple of the wine.

You’ve probably read it in this blog before…bottles, mirrors, anything glass is tricky to photograph. Glass reflects everything around it and can really wash out detail. That’s a big deal because you need to use at least four different light sources and modifiers to properly light just one bottle. That’s if your goal is to make the bottle look smooth and sleek and ready to leap off the wine merchant’s shelf into the buyer’s arms.

At my studio, we carefully lit the wine and took lots of pictures to arrive at the few Dominus had agreed to purchase. They were so happy with the results, though, that they walked away with double the number of images instead. And I ended up with all three bottles of $120/bottle wines as gifts. Whee!!!

We’re truly proud to be a part of Maggiano’s Little Italy’s preferred photographer celebrating Maggiano’s Annual Bridal Faire last week. We’ve also photographed the food, rooms and weddings in this lovely restaurant. I really want to thank the wonderful staffs there that have been so supportive and generous.

Check out our photography album for Maggiano by clicking the images above or below.

We’ve been asked by a few prospects to show them sample images that we took of reflective objects. We figure that we’ll just post a shot we took for a fellow friend, owner of Vintagio winery, which he promptly used for his business card.

The biggest challenge for 99% of product photographers out there are photographing reflective products such as bottles, glasses and especially spheric items. It’s really because with these surfaces, you’ll see the reflection of anything and everything around the object, the sky, windows and even the photographer and his/her camera! The worst thing to do is to use the on-camera flash that creats a hotspot on the reflective objects.

The distractions are avoidable by surrounding the glass object with a surface that you want to see, such as white board or plastic. It’ll help tremendously to create the perfect glass or bottle imagery you want.

- Michael Soo

It was shot two weeks ago for a bakery in Burlingame that sells wedding cakes. I figure I’ll proudly post this image that represents warmth, texture, sweetness and class. It’s definitely a beautiful cake.

Trader Vic’s is a wonderful Polynesian-themed restaurant that has locations worldwide. The founder of the chain, Victor Bergeron Jr, is reputed to have invented the notorious Mai Tai around the time of World War II (yes, this restaurant chain has been around a LONG time).

As you’ll see from this collection of photographs, what the restaurant needed from me, a food photographer, was pictorial representation of a number of its menu items for use at international locations to standardize the look of their food. And with restaurants in locations ranging from Palo Alto to Los Angeles to Atlanta to Abu Dhabi to Beirut to Berlin to Tokyo…and the list goes on, you can see how the customary local cuisine presentations might vary and would benefit from these photos!

(Click on an image, then use your RIGHT and LEFT arrow keys to go through all of them)

As we all know, kids and animals are the traditional bugaboos for photographers. At Trader Vic’s in Palo Alto, I discovered a third problem model: the lowly sterno. As I mentally prepared my blog before this shoot, the titles “Mai Tai, Oh, My” or “Oh, My, Mai Tai” were rolling around in my head. However, this next picture—which took nearly FOUR HOURS to shoot—changed all that.

This photograph contains many elements that are typically a challenge to get right. Reflective containers dare not reflect the camera gear, for one. The beverage ice cubes in the Mai Tai at the front had to be frozen and the mint had to look refreshing to the eye. Minutiae required attention…burning faux grill marks on the skewers, for example. Food stylist, Randy Mon and I had our hands and eyes full indeed.

But I’ll cut to the chase. The dancing flame over the little silver kettle took the most time of all, and it became a head game between us and the can of sterno. Everything would be set: lighting, ice cubes, Blue Hawaiian, skewers…and the sterno would die down. Reset. Sterno wouldn’t flame well. Reset.

I think you get the idea. It was either the sterno, or us. And a picture tells a thousand words. Michael+team: 1; Sterno: 0!!

— Michael Soo

Our commercial photography presentation, has been officially launched alongside our website redesign, SooPhotography.Com !!!

This is great news as we have been working diligently on the presentation as well as our new website for a while now. Our fashion/lifestyle/beauty/glamour website is still under construction but will be up shortly as well. Stay tuned!!

Please sit back and be inspired. Place us into your marketing toolbox.