Oak Smoked Garlic, hand-fired pots.
This smoked garlic smells like those carefree days from childhood, where a box of matches borrowed from the kitchen draw led to secret bonfires in the woods, sheepishly returning home trying to hide the smell of smokey clothing from prying noses. I have no idea how to cook with garlic that smells like post-bonfire clothing.
Poor man’s crème brûlée.
An ever changing combination of raspberries, blackberries, vanilla pod, crème fraîche, natural yogurt, maple syrup and sugar. This was the best one yet and only took about 5 minutes to put together. I won’t be trying to hold a blowtorch in one hand with a camera in the other again though.
All of these shots following the contemporary style for in-progress, close-up food photography. The informal presentation of the food is enhanced with the very shallow depth of field, perhaps slightly too shallow in some cases here. This style seems to be a good shortcut to the desired result of making the food look good enough to eat. I think it is probably much more challenging to get satisfactory results shooting product type food shots where everything in the shot needs to be perfectly presented and in sharp focus.
This shot breaks the best practice [guidelines] I just learned for food photography – mainly as the light here is overhead tungsten lighting, which really shows in the flat look of the photo. The preferred diffused natural light was in short supply at 9pm though, plus our guests were looking at their withheld food threateningly. The [recipe] thankfully, was a real show stopper and also really quite easy to put together if you happen to have some Scottish flaky hot-smoked salmon handy.
I read an [article] on food photography earlier this week. The condensed version of the articles goes something like this; most food wants to be eaten, not photographed, and therefore looks rubbish when photographed. The advice was firstly to undercook the food, let it go cold, photograph low and close up on a non-fussy background, use natural diffused light, custom colour balance and finally to use a shallow depth of field. This shot uses most of those techniques, and although I can see I will be able to improve on this, it is my first attempt at food photography. The final point of the article is to know when not to shoot food at all, and with anemic looking cheese as a subject, this is probably one of them. More to follow this weekend with folk to cook for.
Mother and week born child, Greenfields Children’s Centre, Winsford. Thank you for letting me take your picture.
I spent a rewarding day assisting a professional industrial and architectural photographer at the Children’s centre. This shot is from a series of semi-candid portrait shots of friendly young mums and their new born children, taken after the main architectural photography work was done.
