Chris Bianco - Bianco Pizzeria and Bianco DiNapoli Tomatoes

I’ve long been wanting to start blogging about my images because I like to get in depth with them and nobody cares on Instagram so I’ll move it here for even less people! See, we are already changing lives. I tend to really wax poetic when I talk about photography. I love it. I love my job, I love that I get to do this for a living and I never ever take it for granted. Probably my favorite part of being a photographer is shooting people who I’m a fan of personally. This lands in so many arenas, celebrities, sports, music, podcasters, comedians, I can go on and on. I’m constantly reaching out to people to try to shoot stuff on my own time and just to make pictures. I think that is a super important thing to learn when you’re starting out, the importance of personal work and making stuff for yourself.

These blog posts are going to be very much stream of consciousness. This shoot materialized simply because I heard Chris do an interview on the David Chang Podcast and I fell in love with him and his sweet personality and outlook on life. I have wanted to try his pizza for a long time and was excited they finally opened up at the Row in Downtown Los Angeles. I went down for lunch (priority #1 here) but I brought a camera with me because I knew he was around during their soft opening and figured if I could grab a few frames with him I would love to do it. It was very busy, line around the block type busy, but he was going table to table greeting everyone and signing books and taking selfies and such, so I figured I’d give it a shot and just ask if he had 2 minutes to shoot something with me. He said he would and after I devoured his delicious pizza, NY Style in Los Angeles is a God send mind you, we made a few frames in the front of his restaurant and I was on my way.

All just available, natural light. I normally use flash on everything because I prefer to control the light but sometimes you have to let the sun handle it. Shot on my Phase One P65+ with an 80mm 2.8 Lens - a camera I have owned now for probably 6 years and used probably 6 times haha. It’s one of those things where every time I use it and see the images, I think, why don’t I use this more? I always love the photos. The truth is, it’s heavy, its clunky as hell, and the auto focus/focus point system is laughably bad. In this shoot for instance, I was trying to run and gun and do everything as quick as I could and the focus was off in 4/12 images I shot. Womp womp. Going to start manually focusing I guess. Still pretty happy with what I got, and it was 2 minutes total I checked the raw files. It can be done if you know what you’re after and are ready to do it. Many thanks to Chef Chris Bianco for his time.