Shepherds of Good Hope Calendar

I had the pleasure of working with the Shepherds of Good Hope late last year for a secret calendar project they were working on. Along with other Ottawa photographers Justin Van Leeuwen, Christian Lee, Shane Francescut, Chris Schlesak, Valerie Keeler, and Lindey Gibeau, we all photographed portraits of different chefs in our city.

The first image is of Marc Lepine of Atelier. He's a two time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championship and has his skills down to a science. Which was the theme for the shoot, since he's known for trying extremely creative things in the kitchen with different ingredients, tools, and methods. One of these methods is using liquid nitrogen for flash freezing. Marc was 100% down for this idea and brought a tank of the stuff plus some awesome test tubes he actually uses at Atelier.

Ben Baird of Ottawa Streat Gourmet was shot on top of his amazing food truck in the warehouse he keeps it in overnight. Apparently he's had quite a bit of mechanical trouble with it, and fixing it is as much a part of his job as cooking. We decided to play into that reality with the whisk and the wrench, his tools of the trade.

Brady Kinnell of JOEY Landsdowne was a blast to shoot in their kitchen. The chain of restaurants has a program called Cup of Care, where every year each restaurant makes tons of soup for their local shelters. With that in mind, we had Brady bring his swim trunks and a nautical shirt, got some swimming goggles on him, and plopped him into their soup cauldron for a dip. I brought a rubber ducky just in case which ended up bringing it all together.

Below I've included some BTS pics and vids from the shoots, as well as from the Taste for Hope event where the images were displayed and calendar released.

And be sure to buy a copy of the calendar here!