The Grillographer’s Cut
Welcome to the Grillographer's Cut!
Professionally, I've learned the best way to understand a subject is to teach it. I spent almost my entire law enforcement career teaching as either an adjunct professor or a police academy instructor. These roles pushed me to learn topics in ways I would have never as a mere student of the arts. And yes, this means I can talk ideal grilling temperatures and blood spatter! So, the Grillographer's Cut is just as much for me as it is for you. We will be learning together along the way.
The Grillographer Origin
The title, Grillographer, is an obvious play on words between Grill and Photographer. The title is the creation of my dear friend and former Vice President of Marketing at Weber Grills, Brooke Jones. I was fresh into my new work at Weber, creating content for marketing and handling food styling for commercial shoots, when Brooke hired me to photograph recipes for a Weber Summit Charcoal, now known as Weber Kamado, specific cookbook featuring the new, at the time, Gourmet BBQ System.
A bulk of the recipes were pulled from other Jamie Purviance cookbooks, which the esteemed Tim Turner photographed. To minimize the confusion of my small role as an additional photographer, Brooke credited me as “Grillographer,” and what can I say? It stuck!
My Beginnings
As the origin of Another Pint Please lays out, my photography/video journey has been lifelong. It wasn’t until I honed in on the grill that I had a true focus. My earliest visual memories include making stop-motion movies of Star Wars figures in my sandbox with my Dad’s old Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera. Later, I graduated to an over-the-shoulder VHS camcorder and, thanks to a bevy of RCA cables, two VCRs, and my Commodore Amiga, edited school movie projects. I continued to dabble with video and visuals into my twenties, and as digital cameras took off, my first Canon Powershot, the SD600, led me down the path to food photography.
In the following 19 years, I moved through Canon’s 40D, 7D, 5D Mark IV, and R5. I’ve read books, watched tutorials, made mistakes, taken poor pictures, taken good pictures, and learned all the way through. After a decade of turning my hobby into a career, which includes photographing two cookbooks, I feel I have something to pass on, especially on the video side. There is a cadre of YouTubers to whom I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude for their teachings. Yes, you can shoot excellent video with an iPhone. However, I love the cinema side of videography and try to bring that to my videos, which, for Weber, after the last five years, numbers just under 400.
The Future
The Grillographer’s Cut is how I plan on pushing my knowledge and cementing those little things I discover and then forget. If any of this interests you, I hope you will join me on the journey. I promise we will eat well along the way!
If there is something you want to see or talk about, leave a comment and let me know. Most importantly, subscribe!