Saltwater Studio

Opening and operating a food photography studio in the Santa Cruz Mountains

I’ve spent the majority of my career in San Francisco, Oakland and the greater Bay Area. I worked for 7 years as an assistant food stylist while living in San Francisco and then went out on my own as a lead stylist once we moved to Oakland. I built a community of photographers, stylists and clients that I love working with but at some point I fell out of love with living in the Bay Area. My kids were getting closer to school age, I wanted to be closer to family and the beach, cut down on traffic (tbd if that part worked out for me) and have easier access to nature.

In 2023 we moved to Santa Cruz, a smallish beach town on the coast, close to my hometown with redwoods on one side and ocean on the other. I could still commute to the Bay for work (hello 2 hours of driving/traffic each way) but we would live away from the hustle and bustle of the city. The move has been exactly the right fit for my family and home life. We have an amazing school community, I started swimming in the ocean with friends regularly and my parents and sister are close by to help when we need them. The downside; I was now commuting as much as 20 hours a week and almost 100% of my work took me far from home. For the first year, I told everyone I was fine, “no big deal” I’d say, “I get to catch up on all my favorite podcasts”. About a year in, I started to lose it. The driving at night, inability to be close if my kids got sick, endless traffic and gas bills were all piling up. Around that time, I met Amanda Chasten.

Amanda is a photographer based in Monterey (45 minutes south). She reached out to me about a shoot for a produce company she was photographing at her house. Amanda was photographing as a side hustle while still working her corporate job at the time. She has years of experience working in the food world but started exploring photography in 2020 (hello pandemic job crisis). The shoot went smoothly but the thing I noticed most was how lovely Amanda was to work with. Accommodating, passionate and excited to learn; she was someone I wanted to work with more. We stayed connected and worked on a few more photoshoots at her house as they came up. We met for coffee to chat about a test shoot and I floated an idea that had been rolling around in my head for a while. “What if we open a studio together here in Santa Cruz”? No more working out of Amanda’s living room and a solid reason for her to make the leap from corporate desk job to freelance photography. For me it would mean working close to home more, having a space for recipe development and having more control over the types of photoshoots I worked on. Amanda, who is truly game for any challenge, was immediately on board.

We started mood boarding and planning, trying to figure out where to start. We didn’t want to just open a shared studio space, we wanted a cohesive, joint portfolio to go with it. We wanted to be able to offer ourselves and the studio as a package deal. This is not how things are generally done in the photography industry. Photographers are usually the ones with studios, they are procuring jobs, then putting together a team of stylists for each job. The way we were approaching it was a little more collaborative from the start and a little less hierarchical. We are still both freelancers and work on projects outside of the studio but when it comes to the studio we’re a team first.

We started with lots of testing together, building up the portfolio that would represent the studio. Next was the name. Saltwater Studio because we’re close to the ocean and it nods to the culinary side, plus I love some alliteration. There was logo making, website building and initial client outreach to make sure that we could actually find our market. We did more and more photoshoots out of Amanda’s living room while building our client list and we eventually started searching for the right space. After months of searching, we landed on a cute little building in the Santa Cruz mountains. At 1000 sq. ft. with high ceilings and plenty of windows, it was just what we were looking for, small but manageable. We signed the lease in April 2025 (just over 1 year ago!) and we were off to the races (I mean back breaking work). We spent hours, sanding, painting, cleaning and supplying the space. A photographer I worked with for many years in the Bay Area was retiring and closing his studio serendipitously at the same time we were opening. He was beyond generous in supplying us with kitchen equipment, surfaces and props to very quickly build out a working food photography studio. Within one month of signing the lease we were hosting our first photoshoot.

We had built a small client list of mostly bloggers and substackers and our first shoot in the studio was for Violet Witchel. There were bumps in the road (like when I realized we didn’t have a can opener in the studio while we were already shooting and Violet is the dense bean salad queen so you can imagine some cans needed opening) but it was so exciting to finally be in our own space creating images. The work in the studio really started snowballing last summer and for the first time in 2 years I wasn’t commuting 100% of the time. I still do commute sometimes and will always keep some clients in the Bay but having the option to work 10 minutes from my house, drop the kids off at school before a shoot and even pick them up in a pinch has been life changing.

Saltwater Studio has now hosted dozens of blog shoots and smaller brand shoots. We had our first cookbook shoot in the studio at the end of last year and our first packaging shoot in the studio this spring. In between shoot days, I use the studio for recipe development and computer work. Amanda will test lighting or respond to emails. My friend Britt has a yoga studio up the street (Heartwood Yoga) and occasionally she’ll come down for lunch. It’s like we’ve created a little coworking office space which has been so nice in the sea of lonely freelancing (read more about freelancing here). I love having this sweet, unconventional space. It’s a lot of sweeping, mopping and restocking the toilet paper but I love having a place to park my kit and a true food styling HQ to come home to. If you’re curious to learn more about working with us at Saltwater Studio, Amanda wrote about the process of a photoshoot here on her Substack here. Let me know if you have any questions about our space or the process of opening a studio. I’m here for it all!