Jane-Anne Hobbs Explains Why She Did Her Own Food Styling for Scrumptious

by Amanda on Jul 10th, 2012

Jane-Anne Hobbs, author of the recently published Scrumptious: Food for Family and Friends, has written a blog post about why she decided to do the food styling for the photographs in her own book.

She chose photographer Michael Le Grange to shoot her dishes but sourced all the crockery, cutlery and props herself as well as styling the actual dishes.

Her aim was to create dishes that looked like what she would serve to her friends, avoiding overly styled, unrealistic settings:

My cookbook arrived in South African bookshops on Friday (a friend on Twitter tweeted a snap of a pile of books) and I’m quivering with excitement. This afternoon, I’m going to go to my local Exclusive Books so I can lurk – whistling nonchalantly, with hands in pockets – next to the display. I’m hoping to see a shopper pick up my book and browse through it, because I want to see how he or she reacts to to the photographs. A great deal of thought went into producing simple, beautiful, mouth-watering images for the book, and in this blogpost I’ll tell you how we tried to achieve this. (And you’ll find more behind-the-scenes snaps from the shoot here).