Case Study: Matthew Carden
Occupation: Photographer
Gear: 15-inch MacBook Pro, 13-inch MacBook, 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, Adobe CS3, Nikon D3 DSLR camera
We know, there’s nothing that unusual about a job as a professional photographer, especially among the Mac-using ranks. In Matthew Carden’s case, though, he’s found an unusual--dare we say ”odd”?--photographic niche after many years working as a food and lifestyle photographer for outfits like Williams-Sonoma, Chronicle Books, Taunton Press, and others.
Carden’s current focus—building a business photographing miniature model-train people arranged in interesting and surprising ways in still-lifes with food—arose spontaneously several years ago when Carden had the idea to shoot some miniature people “climbing” some homemade marshmallows that his wife Jennifer, a chef, cookbook author, and food stylist, had prepared. “Homemade marshmallows look nothing like the kind you buy in the store,” Carden says. In fact, they resemble crumbly white chunks of granite much more than the puffy, squarish cotton balls we’re familiar with.
Jennifer got into food styling a little while after graduating from culinary school. “I started shooting a Williams-Sonoma catalog that involved a lot of food,” Carden says. “I was paying a food stylist--who didn’t know anything about food--a lot of money. At that point my wife was working in a restaurant, but knew she didn’t want to own a restaurant. She has an artistic background and I said, ‘Look, this food styling thing is what you should be doing.’ That spun her into food styling, which spun me into more food photography, and it spiraled from there that the food became a more consistent part of our work.”
The dimple at the bottom of this Asian pear was the perfect nook for a mini charwoman.
Carden decided to start doing a series of photos with the mini people to help himself stay on his “creative toes.” He saw it as an exercise “to stay in a creative and aware state of mind more often: Don’t think about it too much, just react and create.”
What drew him to photography in the first place was an interest in creating images that have multiple layers.
“Layers can be ideas or messages behind an image, forms and shapes that create other images, or a play on scale and subject matter--anything that makes people stop and think about a picture.”
Give Him A Mac-Or Two. Like a lot of creative pros, Carden is a Mac user because that was the default platform in his field when he transitioned from film photography to digital. “The interface is easier, the system works better, and the platform is not as fraught with problems as the Windows platform. Of course, there used to be a much bigger divide [between Mac and Windows users].”
Carden tries to avoid buying tech gear just for the sake of owning the newest thing. “I have evolved from massive camera systems that required tricked-out computers and huge monitors to a totally portable and streamlined studio--and I am loving it,” he says.
“Today you can really do anything with any system, depending on what you do, but Macs do look better. I’m a sucker for innovative industrial design. [The Mac] looks and feels better, period. Everything in my studio is brushed aluminum, so our aluminum MacBooks work very well with that.”
Swoosh. Miniature skiers traverse the candy sprinkle-bedecked “slolems” of a red velvet cake Jennifer Carden baked as part of the Carden family New Year’s Eve celebration.
Carden’s current studio setup consists of a 2-year-old 15-inch MacBook Pro; a brand-new 13-inch MacBook (aluminum unibody); a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display; assorted external drives, scanners, and printers; a USB/FireWire hub; and a Wacom tablet. He connects the Macs via an AirPort Extreme wireless base station.
As for software, Carden is an Adobe Creative Suite 3 user, which he doesn’t see changing anytime soon. “I don’t use new stuff anymore unless I have to. The learning curve can really kill my creativity and spontaneity,” he says.
To keep things as spontaneous as possible, Carden says having a somewhat uniform workflow for every shoot helps keep him focused on the end result. He shoots all his photos in RAW, uploads them to his Mac, previews and organizes them using Adobe Bridge, converts the images to TIF and makes initial tweaks in Camera Raw. “Almost all post is done in Photoshop,” he adds. “I try to make a point of shooting what I want, but the ability to control everything in Photoshop is amazing. Even when I think an image is shot perfectly, I can usually improve it somehow in Photoshop.”
Of course, he adds, he tries to avoid tweaking images to the point of “blatant manipulation.” The goal, he says, is simply to arrive at “the best possible version of an image.”
Life In Miniature. So just how big is Carden’s personal collection of mini model-train figures?
“When you look at how many are available, it’s not that big,” he says. “There are a billion different styles and themes, but there are a lot of weird ones that you wonder why they make for trains, like scuba divers. It never ceases to amaze me how many different kinds there are. Some friends of mine were just in Germany and brought me back a set of nudists, which I’d never seen before. Where is that going in your train set?” he wonders, laughing.
These fiery-hot chicken wings were on their way to the dinner table when Carden borrowed them for an ad hoc shoot.
Another oddball theme in model-train miniatures is a series of people mooning, Carden says. “There’s some subculture down in Los Angeles, who on the same day every year, go out and moon the Amtrak trains. Apparently that was justification enough to come out with a series of people doing that.”
So will Carden create a series of food shots for his portfolio featuring the miniature mooners?
“Stuff like that I almost don’t even know where to go with because it’s so weird and random that I don’t know if people would understand what was going on,” he says.
He’s toyed with the idea of contacting the companies that make the mini figures, to let them know that he’s using their products in ways they probably never imagined.
The potential to grow his collection of little people is almost endless, he says, but it will depend on whether he can carve out his niche as a photographer who works with the tiny figures.
“There are always more I could buy,” he says. “I rarely buy people for a specific reason. I’ll go and I’ll find things that strike me, and some food or context will pop up spontaneously and I’ll connect the two.”
That kind of visual serendipity keeps the work exciting.
Carden had some firefighter figures in his collection, and one evening Jennifer prepared some hot wings for the family to eat. The chicken wings were on their way to the dinner table and Carden says he grabbed them for an impromptu shoot with the wee firemen.
While he recognizes that not all paid shoots can be governed by that level of spontaneity, he hopes he can try to infuse that feel into every assignment he gets. For more of Carden’s work, see “10 Reasons Your Small Business Should Run on Macs”, and check out his website: www.matthewcarden.com.
