Since I left my position at Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure, I have started freelancing more. One of the projects I’ve picked up is photographing concerts for The Bowery Presents’ House List, which provides reviews and imagery from all of Bowery’s music venues across New York City. These include Webster Hall, Brooklyn Bowl, Mercury Lounge, The Bowery Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Terminal 5, The Wellmont Theatre and the IZOD Center in New Jersey.

On Dec. 2, Baths played at The Bowery Ballroom in the Bowery. My boyfriend wrote the review for the electronic pop band led by Will Wiesenfeld as I snapped away to capture the show. It was an intimate setting, and with just one person providing all of the music from their laptop and few instruments, it was a bit of a challenge to make aesthetically appealing through the lens. The light was interesting, though not ideal, and there were dozens of small candles placed around the entire stage that provided a lot of depth to the setting. Baths was great, the crowd was relaxed and everyone was grooving along as if this was their last chance to dance. See some additional shots below:

One of my friends at Travel + Leisure, Lyndsey Matthews, had the task of researching and crunching tons of numbers to compile T+L’s list on the World’s Most-Visited Tourist Attractions. While she was completely inundated with trying to sort out various figures, dates and math (!), I started rounding up images of the venues on my end. Since her research was continuously in progress, that meant that the photographs we needed to accompany the text were always in limbo. Finally all 50 top attractions were nailed down, with No. 1 coming in for Times Square, New York, New York. Times Square is conveniently located one block away from our office, so I popped down there to take some shots of the tourist trap (and probably looked like a tourist while shooting myself), and landed on the front page of Travel + Leisure. The story was also picked up by The BBC, Yahoo! and quite a few personal blogs.

World's Most-Visited Tourist Attractions, a Travel + Leisure original on Yahoo!

Pegu Club.

Visiting a bar while it is closed — and during the day — is strange. The interiors are quiet and tidy, and bathed in sunlight, which is not how I am familiar with being greeted by any New York City bar. At both venues I met with the head bartender who accommodated every request, especially Leo from Eleven Madison Park who ensured I personally tasted his whiskey concoction at our 10 a.m. shoot.

Table for Two, Pegu Club.

House Speciality.

I am extremely grateful for the amazing opportunities I have been blessed with at Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure (and all of the sweet perks, like tasting cocktails, that come along with the gig), but I accepted a new position at Condé Nast and will be leaving my post at American Express Publishing. I agreed to an offer from the print photo department at Self Magazine to be their photo assistant, where I will be producing more shoots for the book and will be handling less web content. It’s a bittersweet time to be moving on, but I know this change is best for my career goals and I look forward to collaborating with a new team. But don’t worry just yet, I have a few more web exclusives from both Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure in the works that will hit the Internet before I depart to Self soon.

Eleven Madison Park.

Cheers to a healthy & happy 2012!

In the spirit of Halloween, Food & Wine wanted to put together a slideshow about America’s Haunted Restaurants and Hotels. I headed down to Manhattan Bistro in SoHo and was welcomed by a few surprises. When I met with the owner she asked if I wanted to see the well in the basement. Since I had just received the shoot list for the lineup and had not reviewed any text yet I wasn’t exactly sure what a well had to do with the story. She informed me that the well (above) was from the 17th Century, back when SoHo was just a field, and that a woman had been murdered and thrown into it. She then escorted me down the basement stairs to the well. It was creepy just knowing that I was photographing an object that someone had been murdered in, even if it was hundreds of years before I was even born. I quickly snapped a few shots and returned upstairs where I took a few general interior images to round out our collection. Though the holiday gives Food & Wine a reason to branch out into a bit of a different territory, I’d prefer avoiding all murder scenes for future shoots.

Queen's Kickshaw in Astoria has one of the best damn grilled cheese sandwiches in America.

While I was curating Food & Wine’s Best Grilled Cheese in the U.S. feature, there were a lot of New York City locations that needed to be shot by our team. This amounted to me receiving about $50 worth of free grilled cheese over the span of a few days while I was setting up shoots and going on location. Though I never thought I would say it, I definitely needed a break from bread and cheese after that. My first stop was The Queen’s Kickshaw in Astoria, where I photographed and sampled the Gruyere sandwich (above) with pickled and caramelized onions on rye with Napa cabbage-caraway slaw; the Gouda melt (below) with black bean hummus, guava jam, pickled jalapenos on brioche with green salad and jalapeno vinaigrette and the simple staple Cheddar & Mozzarella on brioche with tomato soup. While they were all delicious, the Gouda melt was absolutely my favorite:

The next stop, in between bites of decadent truffle grilled cheeses the other photo editors were bringing back to the office from their shoots, was Beecher’s Handmade Cheese. Beecher’s is based out of Seattle but has a sister store on Broadway in the Flatiron District, where I stopped by to check out their cafe and all of the delicious sandwiches and cheeses they make:

Here I tried the Flagship melt (above), which is served with Flagship and Just Jack cheeses, basil, tomato and whole-grain mustard. I also sampled the Mortadella and Black Forest Ham, which is layered with Dijon mustard, McClure’s pickles, spinach and both the Flagship and Cream Jack house-made cheeses:

If you ever have the opportunity to stop by either of these stores, I would highly recommend it. You won’t be disappointed.

Cheers!

America's Best Cities for Ice Cream — Food & Wine Original on MSNBC.

America's Most Attractive People — Travel + Leisure Original on Yahoo!

America's Best Cities for Ice Cream — Food & Wine Original on Huff Post Food:

America's Best Cities for Ice Cream — Food & Wine Original on The Today Show's website.

Best Grilled Cheese in the U.S. — Food & Wine Original on TODAY's and MSNBC's website.

America's Best Cities for Ice Cream — Food & Wine Original on Yahoo!

North America's Most-Visited Tourist Attractions — Travel + Leisure Original on BBC.

America's Best Cities for Ice Cream — Food & Wine Original on The Daily Meal:

More to come!

one: During my senior year of college I was asked to participate in a research trip to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt to track trends and forecasts for the future of the Internet at the United Nation’s Internet Governance Forum. I went as a student researcher with Imagining the Internet and enjoyed a week in a beachy paradise located on the Sinai Peninsula and jutting out into the Red Sea. I can easily remember the beautiful swim I took in the Red Sea. And I also remember how I felt when I saw Sharm on the shoot list for this: Worst Beaches for Shark Attacks. Sharm’s No. 8.

two: American Express Publishing Corporation, the parent of Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, is also the owner of few other titles, including Departures. Departures is a luxury lifestyle publication only available to American Express Black Card members. A few weeks ago they started the post-production process to expand a story from the July/August issue about Great American Heritage Brands. Not every brand in the print story had a corresponding photo tied to it for the slideshow, so we conducted image research on a few places. Luckily J.Press is located in New York City, so I was able to walk a few blocks from work and shoot it for the feature. It was my birthday, so it was a nice treat to get out of the office and have a chance to create.

three: Last July I bought tickets to go all the way up to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, which had a two month waiting period. Even though it is a drag to basically go through airport-style security to even get on the boat to Ellis or Liberty Island, once you are on the boat you are free to shoot anything. I snapped some really picturesque shots during the ferry ride over and had a truly unique perspective once I was taking photos through the glass panels of Lady Liberty’s crown (which only 30 people per hour are allowed to experience). When it was announced that the Statue of Liberty would be closing for renovation this fall, our editors wanted to get a story live quickly. The photographs I took on that long-anticipated day trip sure came in handy. Check it out:

Just this week one of my photographs of Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ (which ironically enough is actually located in Missouri) was featured in Travel + Leisure’s Best Barbecue Restaurants in the World package. It was one of those rare times a T+L shoot list floats by and not only have I actually visited one of the places, but have also photographed it. While I dug through the files on my laptop to unearth the images, it triggered major positive memories of exactly a year ago, when I originally visited the joint.

Flashback to July of last year, 2010. I had recently graduated from Elon, was freelancing in Columbus and was heading into a two week vacation with my boyfriend to embark on a road trip from Columbus to Boulder to Chicago and back again to catch up with a few friends. Our first rest stop was in St. Louis, where we crossed the Illinois border and were immediately greeted by the St. Louis Arch:

We had an amazing lunch at a tapas restaurant downtown and a quick walk around the park, then loaded back up into the car to spend the night in Kansas City, Missouri. It was a Friday so after we got settled in the hotel we made a dash for the Power & Light District, where we stopped by Howl at the Moon for some dueling pianos … and a bucket of liquor:

The next day, before we geared up to drive across the rest of the Midwest, we did a quick search on Yelp for barbeque restaurants. And what we found was nothing short of astounding — Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ. Not only does Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ function out of a gas station (which also is fully functioning), but it also has a line that typically snakes around the entire restaurant and almost out the door and it also tops Anthony Bourdain’s 13 Places to Eat Before You Die list. I ordered a pulled pork sandwich and onion rings and Dan had to try the burnt ends (what they’re famous for), coleslaw and a half rack of ribs:

Presenting Oklahoma Joe's BBQ, which is also a gas station.

Chowing on ribs.

Delicious burnt ends, flavorful chunks of smoked brisket which also happen to be Joe's specialty.

It was an epic and amazing meal, and I’m happy to be able to cross off at least one restaurant on Bourdain’s list. The rest of the trip was lovely, and you can read more about my killer breakfast in Boulder at The Buff here. A few additional highlights from the road include a sunset visit to Colorado’s Flatiron Mountains, a perfect garden lunch in Omaha and the best open-mic night I’ve ever been to in Chicago.

Atop the Flatirons.

The best grilled veggie sandwich in Omaha.

Open-mic night at Gallery Cabaret, an indie bar in Chicago.