Ken Rivard Photography
Fields Corner, Massachusetts
Fields Corner, Massachusetts
Food and restaurant photography.
After a career in ghost-writing I got my start in photography shooting the food of my James Beard Award winning wife, Chef Jody Adams. From there I moved to restaurant interiors and staff photography - all of which I still actively do.
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What’s the secret to taking a great photograph?
Trust. I like working with people, whether it's about the food a chef cooks or shooting a portrait. With food, it means explaining how dishes plated for photography may be subtly different from those plated for diners. I've worked in restaurants, and I still spend a lot my time in kitchens personally and professionally. I know restaurant culture intimately and how its people work. With people, it's about getting people to relax, maybe even enjoy being in front of the camera. Whether it's about people or food, I see myself as a collaborator with clients in producing great images. I don't TAKE photographs - I make great images with my clients.
What questions might you ask a client when starting a new project?
After we get through the business of how many images they want and how they intend to use them, I start asking about visual ideas. What have you seen? What do you like? Is there a particular style you'd like to see in your images. Headshots for a corporate newsletter are going to be different than an idiosyncratic portrait. If I'm shooting food, obviously I'm trying to capture the style of the restaurant; if I'm shooting a food product - fruit, vegetables, meat or fish, I'm trying to convey quality, and perhaps a bit of the story of the people behind the product. But whatever I'm photographing, I try to bring just a bit of something different to each client that says, "This is special. This is me," or "This is who we are, this is what an experience with us will be."
What do you love most about your job?
Working with people, getting them to step outside their ordinary lives for a short while. I love talking to restaurateurs, fisherman and farmers about their work. For a few years I lived on a Michigan dairy farm as a child, and as I mentioned earlier, since I'm married to a chef, restaurants still play a big role in my life. Chefs have become celebrities, but for the longest time they were never heard from. The same is true of farmers and fishermen. People can be enormously invested in what they do, even if they're not compensated for it. I like showing that.
What inspired you to start your own business?
Aside from photojournalists - an increasingly endangered job - when have photographers NOT had their own businesses? My circumstances are a little unusual. During my ghostwriting career I worked with people in the wine and restaurant business. My wife and I wrote a fairly successful cookbook and our agent suggested we start a blog. A food blog without photography is an arid thing. My first photographs were terrible, but then I started to take online classes in and I got better. People began paying attention to our blog (www.thegarumfactory.net) and eventually I began getting inquiries about professional work.
Why should our clients choose you?
I'm easy. I'm willing to adapt if something isn't working. If I sense that a client and I aren't meant for one another, I'll say so. Life is too short for anything but good relationships.
