Featured fPOE Photographer - Jessica Chevalier

Meet Jessica Chevalier of LostInTheValley!

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a vegetable farmer living in the Adirondacks with an addiction to photography!

I love sewing and have a bit of a fabric obsession. Gardening is another love of mine. I’m also a Begonia dork. I have a bunch of them lining my windowsills with the occasional orchid squeezed in. 

 

Describe your creative process and what inspires you.

I love to go for hikes. There’s lots of inspiration in the deep woods! Thankfully my boyfriend doesn’t mind that I’m constantly interrupting our hike to stop and take a picture. He has the patience of a saint as I stop frequently!

I get the photos onto the computer as soon as I get back from a hike and immediately pick out my favorites. I wish I could say I’m good about editing right away, but I have hundreds, if not thousands of potential photos that need editing. I try to get at between 1-5 photos edited a day.

Outside of the forest, I love food photography. I’ve started a little culinary ‘adventure’ where I invent a dish or pick something out of a cookbook, make it, and then photograph it. I have a little ‘stage’ set up in my studio that I go running to when the food is fresh off the stove and I photograph it.

Tell us about your camera and favorite lenses.

I own a Canon 5D Mark III and I love it! It’s hard to choose just one lens as a favorite. 

My top three fav’s are my 100mm f/2.8L IS macro, my Lensbaby with Edge 80 attachment (the sweet 35 is pretty great too for certain things!), and my ‘boring’ nifty 50mm f/1.8. 

Where else can we find your work besides your Etsy shop?

I have a website, www.lostinthevalleyphotography.com, and am working on creating a website just for my food photography.

I’ve had some success entering juried shows at various art galleries around the Adirondacks. Recently, two of my food photographs were published in the fall/winter issue of LOCALadk magazine (pages 57-58) from a shoot I did with a local food Co-op.


Any advice for those just getting started as a photographer?

Learn to use your camera in manual mode! Read your camera’s owner’s manual front to back. Practice, practice, practice! Practice indoors and out, with morning light and evening light, with different camera settings, etc. You’ll never really stop learning and I love that about photography. Compare the photos you took today to those you’ll take in a year. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how far you’ve come if you keep at it.


Any favorite Etsy shops or “finds”?

If I were to look at my favorite shops, there seems to be a theme: Pottery shops, jewelry shops, photography shops (of course!), and illustration shops. I seem to gravitate towards artfully made hand-crafted pieces. I love how diverse the people of Etsy are even if there are many others doing the same craft! I may have several pottery shops (for example) ‘favorited’, but they all have their own unique style and I love that!