Chef on the Move

Anthony Pierrard is a personal gourmet chef who has created his own line of all natural marinara sauce. Inspired by his daughter Gillian, who Anthony says loves his sauce, Gillian's Gourmet Sauce Tomate, is great over pasta and can be used as the main ingredient in several recipes.

I had the opportunity to photograph Anthony and Gillian for Princeton Magazine. Anthony was offering samples of the sauce to shoppers at McCaffery's in Princeton. I watched and shot as he made friends with everyone that went by. Even speaking in his native French with some of the customers. Then switching to Italian (he was a chef in Italy for some time), he talked about recipes with another woman. Check out Anthony's recipes including those for avocado soup, Gillian's Lasagna and gazpacio.

Anthony has been moving his sauce store by store. Starting in McCaffery's
and now in four different Wegman's and Whole Foods too, including one of the largest in New York City. His hard work is paying off.

In addition to his commitment to creating an all natural sauce, Anthony donates 1% of profits to 1% for the Planet, an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet.

Natural food and a healthy planet...a great combination. I really enjoyed meeting Anthony and we remain friends today.


Shoot Details:
Supermarkets are well lit. After all , we need to see the food in the best light. I added one small strobe to the right of the camera to fill in the shadows. I fired it remotely using the Nikon CLS, triggered by the pop up flash commander on my camera. I used a a small diffuser on the flash. It was positioned directly across from Anthony and pointed at him.

I stood back several feet from the action since I was using the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. I was able to get great isolation of the subject from the background in many of the shots.

Privacy Note: One woman came up to me and in an annoyed tone asked me how it was that I was taking pictures in the market without asking her permission. Of course, I'm not an expert on the laws but in reality, as long as the management allowed me to photograph (which they did), it was OK for me to take pictures without people's individual permission. This is because people were in a public place and had no reasonable expectation of privacy. Now, I didn't explain that to the concerned woman...I just made sure that she was not in any of my photos. In fact, I normally don't publish pictures of people (where you can recognize them) who haven't given me their permission.