Brie Passano really captures the spirit of following your passion.

The Montana native graduated from Northwest College in 2004 and today works as a food photographer for media giant Meredith Corporation, at its studio in Des Moines, Iowa.

Via Zoom, she spoke last week to Jennifer Litterer-Trevino’s NWC photography class about how she started in the business. Food stylist Sammy Mila, who works in the same studio, joined her to talk about their collaboration.

Photographers tend to have a certain niche that they’re particularly good at, Passano explained. For herself, it’s not shooting room sets or quilts. Her thing is food. Food photography is still life, she said, but it’s also a living thing.

“The key for me is to make it look appetizing and yummy and feature the ingredients,” Passano said. “You have to be able to quickly communicate what the food tastes like visually.”

Putting in the leg work

Passano said she always loved food and she always loved photography.

Before she pursued her associate degree in photography at NWC, she flirted with the idea of entering culinary school. Her mother encouraged her to pursue cooking as a hobby instead of a profession, and Passano decided food photography would be a way to combine her two passions.

After college, she spent some months trying to figure out a direction for her career.

“I then kind of moved to New York on a whim,” Passano said, where she would spend over a decade developing her professional skills.

Passano said she did everything to get experience in the business. She called up a lot of photographers to get work as an assistant, and even did some work for free.

“I really did a lot of leg work to try to get my foot in the door, and then more opportunities came,” Passano recalled.

After a year, she was offered a job as a studio manager and first assistant for Greg Lord, a still life photographer. She did that for a year, and the experience gave her a broad view of professional photography, from production through post-production, renting equipment, location scouting, bookkeeping and more about the business side of photography. 

After that, Passano went freelance for about 12 years, working as an assistant and doing digital tech work, where she managed files and workflow, ran the shooting software, set up monitors — that sort of thing.

She said she got a taste of a range of photography work through those years, and it provided her with a broad skillset.

“Everything is a totally different animal. It was really valuable for me to have all those experiences of seeing how each photographer would creatively problem-solve on their jobs,” she said.

Three years ago, she landed the full-time gig with Meredith and moved to Des Moines.

Collaboration

One of the joys of working at the studio, Passano said, is the range of work she does. Meredith oversees more than a dozen brands, including People, Better Homes and Gardens, Allrecipes, and Food & Wine magazines. They also publish what are called “bookazines,” such as Midwest Living.

Passano has also shot for packaging projects for Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

“It’s fun to have such a diversity of work,” she said.

One of the biggest benefits of working in the studio she said, is all the collaboration that goes on there. In Des Moines, Passano is one of five photographers on staff. Sometimes, she takes a stroll around the studio to see what other photographers are doing. By watching how they creatively approach problems, she gets all kinds of ideas to apply to her own work.

The photographers regularly bounce ideas off each other, which Passano said was very different from her college experience, where you’re often working on just your own project. Throughout her career, she said she’s gotten so much from the work she does with others. 

“You’re learning all the time,” Passano said.

Among her collaborators in Des Moines is Mila, the food stylist. Mila is originally from Iowa and graduated from Iowa State, with a degree in culinary science. She explained her degree as the “chemistry of why we cook.” 

Mila started in the test kitchen, where they figured out the weights and measurements of recipes so that readers don’t have to. Eventually, she moved over to the photography side, where she gets to apply all that technical knowledge in a creative way.

Oops moments

Mila’s advice for food stylists is not to go for perfection; those pies that bubble over and push out the crust create a natural look.

“You really want to embrace those ‘oops’ moments,” Mila said.

Passano said Mila’s scientific background makes her great for figuring things out, such as how to make meat look more red. She also has the little tricks, like using Pam to refresh the food.

“When the food gets cold, things get a little cold [visually]. When you Pam it, it brings it back to life again,” Mila said, adding that oils such as olive oil, which has a green sheen, sometimes color the food.

Passano has her own tricks as well, such as slipping a penny or two under a glass to tip it just enough to get that curve of the glass to come out.

Passano said her biggest challenge is separating the food from the background in creative ways “to make it really pop.” She tries to use the background to give the food highlights so it looks “fresh and yummy,” but doesn’t drown it.

She follows trends in food photography and sometimes tries to mimic other photographers’ work to figure out how they accomplished a shoot. Mila and Passano also collaborate with an art director on set, who helps set up and make decisions on background. Passano said it’s helpful since, while she’s shooting, she doesn’t always have the bigger picture of how the photographs are going to live on the page.

Passano started with an interest in food and photography, and she’s built a career doing what she loves. Now at Meredith, she’s had an amazing opportunity to indulge her passions and take her work to the next level.