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The Food Show is your once a year foodie affair! Coming to a city near you in 2027
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Food photography looks effortless, but capturing a massive flat lay like this is an absolute masterclass in chaos management.

Behind this single frame lies a mountain of technical hurdles: managing natural and artificial lighting to eliminate harsh shadows on reflective ceramic plates, mastering top-down perspective and composition to keep dozens of dishes feeling balanced without looking cluttered, and racing against time as steam fades, condensation forms, and textures begin to dry out. Every single element—from the precise angle of the chopsticks to the placement of the drinks—requires micro-adjustments using macro lenses, meticulous staging, and colour balancing to ensure every dish pops off the screen.

It takes patience, problem-solving, and professional gear to turn a massive feast into art. What looks like a simple dinner table is actually hours of lighting setup, styling, and precision shooting.

Drop a comment below: Would you have the patience to shoot a spread like this?

#FoodPhotography #BehindTheScenes #CommercialPhotography #FoodStyling #ProPhotographer #LightingTechniques #FlatLayPhotography #NikonCreator #NikonNZ #GastronomyPhotography

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#foodexpo expo

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And I have no regrets because this cake is delicious!

It’s the @foodshownz date and coconut cake (you can find the recipe on their website) which we pair with a side of vanilla yoghurt! 🤤

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Reminiscing on how good the Wellington Food Show was 🥹

We had such a fun time and can’t wait to do all again next year.

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Recently, I’ve rediscovered my passion for baking and my food gram, which I originally started when I was a uni student. I love sharing the food I eat, the products I buy and, of course, the food I make.

The only slight issue is that one girl cannot physically eat all this baking every week, so my co-workers are now the main beneficiaries of my passion project making a comeback 😂 To the point where a colleague jokingly said, “I was hoping you were bringing baking in” when I didn’t bring anything in on a Monday. (It was the weekend after Beervana… I was far too dusty to do any baking on Sunday 😂)

Last week, I made raspberry toast cookies 🍞 and the process of making these was rather fun… and a little bit sticky. I also felt like such a rookie because I had never browned butter before. I always thought it was going to be hard and stressful, but it was SO easy. I genuinely don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner!

These cookies had such a great texture, with a crispy, crunchy outside thanks to the toast crumbs. My only regret is that I didn’t add some extra ripples of jam through the dough.

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Nothing is moving.

No wind on the ridge, no drift off the discs, every granule going where it was aimed. After the run of days we have had, a still morning like this is a gift.

Rain is forecast tomorrow. That is why the job is happening today and not on Thursday.

Fertiliser sitting on dry ground is a stone. It does nothing at all until water dissolves it and carries it down to where the roots are actually working. Put it on and have rain arrive on top of it within a day, and the whole lot starts working at once. Put it on and get three dry weeks, and some of what you paid for never reaches the plant.

The job gets timed against a forecast, not a calendar.

Now look at the third photo. That white behind the machine is not mist. Those are granules, thrown off two spinning discs, flying out well past the wheel tracks on either side.

Here is the part almost nobody thinks about. One pass is not even. It cannot be. The spread is heaviest close to the machine and thins right out at the edges. Evenness only appears when the next pass lays its heavy middle over the thin tail of the last one. Bout width, disc speed, vane setting, and the size and density of that particular product, because every product flies differently.

Get the sum right, and the paddock gets one even feed. Get it wrong by two metres, and you have striped the block.

Wind wrecks that arithmetic. Coarse granules carry, fines fall short, a crosswind shifts the whole pattern sideways, and nobody can see it happening from the cab.

None of this shows up today.

It shows up in six weeks. Dark stripes where the overlap doubled, pale stripes where it missed, and a crop that matures at two different speeds out of one paddock.

A good spread is invisible. Only a bad one ever shows.

🚜 Thank a farmer. Every meal. Every day.

🌻

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There's nobody in either of these photographs.

No tractor. No sprayer. No one on a knee in the row. Two onion paddocks, a few weeks apart in age, both just standing there getting on with it.

This is the quiet part of the season. It doesn't last long.

The loud work is already done. The ground worked, the beds formed, the seed drilled at a depth someone decided on, the fertiliser placed, the water put on when it was wanted. Most of that happened in a hurry, against a forecast.

And now, for a few weeks, the job is mostly to look.

Which is the strange thing about a paddock like this. It reads as empty. Nothing is visibly happening in it. And it's the most decisive month in the whole crop.

An onion doesn't choose when to start making a bulb. Daylength chooses. Somewhere in late spring (around Labour Weekend) the days get long enough, the plant switches over, and from that morning on it stops putting up new leaves and starts filling the ones it already has. Every leaf base swells into a scale.

Cut an onion in half on your bench tonight and count the rings. That's a leaf count from a paddock in spring, still sitting there in your kitchen months later.

So every warm day now, and every bit of moisture within reach of those roots, is going straight into the size of a summer onion. Quietly. On a deadline nobody set, and nobody can move.

Look at the first photo again. Follow the rows to where they meet. There's a shed on the horizon sitting almost exactly where they converge, and the sky over it takes up three quarters of the frame.

That's what most of farming actually looks like.

Not the harvest. This.

🧅 Thank a farmer. Every meal. Every day.

🌻

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Chicken Stir Fry road trip recipe. @foodshownz and @mazda_nz please help me get the wife a new car

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Had an awesome time shooting Pitch to Plate last weekend 👨‍🍳🏟️

@manufeildelofficial & @cfassnidge cheffing up a storm for a 5 course meal around @hnrystadium 🥄

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[📍The Food Show, Wellington ] One of my favourite events of the year for sure! Missed out on the Auckland one so flew to Welly instead 😂 #thefoodshownz#wellingtonfood#wellington#wellingtoneats

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This block was never thirsty. That's the part worth knowing.

Iceberg lettuce at @bhanafamilyfarms, Pukekohe. Three rows to a bed, and it's been irrigated the whole way through. Fed, watered, kept clean, tracking along on its date. Nobody let this crop want for anything.

Then the rain came through on the weekend, and those rogue showers have been wandering about the district all week.

And now it's a different paddock.

So why does rain change a crop that was already getting water?

Because irrigation and rain aren't doing the same job.

Irrigation is maintenance. You work out roughly what the crop used yesterday, and you put that back on the ground you can reach. It holds the crop where it needs to be, and it holds the date. Done well, and this is done well, it's invisible.

Nobody praises a crop for looking normal.

Rain is surplus. It's more than the crop needed, all at once, on everything, including the ground no pipe goes to.

That's the whole difference. Maintenance keeps a crop on its number. Surplus lets it go past it.

The fertiliser tells the same story. A good bit of it was already in solution and feeding these plants; that's why they look like a crop and not a disaster. The rain moved the rest of it down into reach.

So what you're looking at isn't a rescue. It's a crop that was being carried properly, and then got handed more than it needed for three days running.

And it isn't only the lettuce. The grass on the verges, the shelterbelts, the weeds in the headlands, the paddock over the fence. Every living thing in Franklin did the same thing on the same three days.

Which brings me to the bit that gets missed.

Rain like that does nothing for a paddock that wasn't already right. It runs off, sits, or feeds the weeds. It only turns into this on ground that was formed, planted on its spacing, fed and looked after for weeks beforehand.

Every millimetre this crop got before Saturday was a decision somebody made at five in the morning about which block goes first.

The rain was the first water it got that nobody had to decide about.

🥬 Thank a farmer. Every meal. Every day.

🌻

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Thank you to all of you who came to the @foodshownz Wellington and made it the epic 3 days that it was 🙌 I’ve come home with an almost empty car and haven’t had any time to rest as you all want more, and the stock needs replenishing. What a terrible complaint to have 😎Best I “crack” on.

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