Christina Peters

Coming up... And you're looking through the images and you're like, God, these suck.

I'm Christina Peters, and I've been a commercial food photographer for over 30 years, and I'm transitioning to the fine art world.

I'm based in Delaware, and before that, I was in Los Angeles for many, many years.

first time I started shooting I was eight with my dad's camera this was in days of film when I was little I had the visual in my mind of what I thought the image was going to look like and again this is days of film and so you take all the pictures you run the film through Kodak and then you get it back two weeks later and then you're looking through the images you're like god these suck and

You know, these really suck.

Why?

Like, why do they look so different from what I remembered?

And so that started the quest to pre-visualize something and then be able to exactly create it as a photograph.

Making photography a career without it being a full-time job at another company, everything is gig work.

I joke around that I'm always unemployed.

A job could be one day, a job could be three weeks.

But once I focused on food, that's when things really took off for me.

So there's different types of food clients.

When we're working with a magazine and photographing at a restaurant, if the client has a chef and they're insisting on doing the food, then I ask the questions like, okay, so this is different than planning for the restaurant.

You're planning for camera.

Do you know what that means?

You have to tilt things up so that we can see things.

It'll look normal in the photo, but on set, it'll look crazy.

And when we are doing things commercially, like for the big brands, so like fast food brands, what you see on those ads are completely not like what you get in real life.

You know, we might have spent an hour and a half in the studio creating that food product.