Baking for the Season – Behind the Scenes of The Bend’s October Issue
For the October 2024 issue of The Bend Magazine, I photographed a pair of fall recipes developed and written by Kayla Butts for the “Baking for the Season” feature. Kayla and I have worked on many editorial food stories together, and our process is straightforward: she handles the recipe styling and overall aesthetic direction, and I focus on lighting, framing, and composition to translate that vision into photographs.
Kayla’s home consistently makes these shoots easier. The kitchen has a northeast-facing window that provides soft, steady natural light through most of the morning. That light has become a reliable part of our workflow for the magazine. It keeps colors true, textures defined, and gives the recipes the kind of warmth that artificial lighting often complicates for editorial settings. Every dish in this feature — the Apple Cinnamon Monkey Bread and the Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins — was photographed using that same window light.
For this story, Kayla styled the set with seasonal elements that stayed subtle: apples, cinnamon sticks, warm linens, vintage plates, and neutral surfaces that didn’t compete with the food. My job was to adjust angles and compositions to highlight the details that make fall baking visually interesting — the caramelized apples on the monkey bread, the crumb topping on the muffins, and the textures that come through when working with natural light.
Editorial food photography is often a balance of restraint and detail, and these recipes lent themselves well to that. The colors were naturally warm, the dishes had enough structure to photograph cleanly, and the styling supported the story without overwhelming it. This feature sits in the October 2024 “Cuisine” section of The Bend Magazine, and the full recipes appear both in print and on their website.
Posts like this serve as a record of the process more than anything — how the shoot came together, the lighting choices, and the collaboration behind the final images. If you enjoy fall baking, both recipes are worth making at home, and they show exactly why natural-light editorial food photography continues to be such an effective approach for dishes with real texture and color.
