Since you are both full-time content creators now, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned in making a big change in your career?

Ryan: The most important thing for me is just trying not to overthink things. It’s a lot different than recipe development for restaurants. I used to tend to go into long processes and it’s just not the place. Generally making things simpler is the most important thing I’ve learned. 

Haley: Having come from the influencer side of things and moving over to ghost content work, I feel like the biggest thing I’ve learned is perspective. On the influencer side, a brand is looking for your perspective and on the ghost content side, they’re looking for their perspective.

So you really kind have to humble yourself before the brand’s vision and more often you have to kill your darlings than you would on the influencer side. That’s been like a learning curve, but I think there’s something magic about that kind of creativity too. It’s just been a shift in the way I get to explore my own creative vision.

The filtered world of social media often hides a lot of the hard work and hustle behind-the-scenes, especially when it comes to food photography. What is the reality that goes into creating beautiful images of food?

Ryan: From a styling perspective, textures and thinking about height. If you sit down at a restaurant and get a plate of food, it’s not necessarily going to transfer to the camera as well as like you see it right in front of you. So just thinking about perspective, and how to make the food look better on camera. Like making sure things that don’t look dry or whatever. And lighting! Good lighting is huge. 

Haley: Yeah. I think people underestimate how much goes into one single shot. There’s a lot of prep work that goes into food photos. Sourcing all of the props, buying all of the ingredients, developing the recipe – one photo can take a month of prep work before even starting photographing. And then the photo itself could take days. There’s just so much that goes into it.

We shot a cover of a magazine and we were featuring a real ice cream product, so we couldn’t use fake ice cream. It took us two days and ultimately the composition of three different shots to get the photo because ice cream is so volatile! Between the hot lights and having to get the perfect scoop and the perfect stack, it took a lot of work. I think people look at the final picture and they’re like, “Oh, that’s beautiful”, but they wouldn’t know it was two full days of work and three different photos put together.