November 23, 2009 by Suwandi
I know this week is supposed to be a savoury verine week, but I decided to put my inferiorly developed creativity up to test and see what I can come up with.
A bit of story behind this shot. I was going to this factory outlet with my other half the other day. I, as usual, wander around aimlessly waiting for her to shop. Usually when we come to this factory outlet, I have a routine schedule to visit all other stores except the fashion related shop. So I usually start with the News Agency where I can spend a good half an hour reading through magazines – until the owner ask me with irritated tone “How can I help you?” – then I know it’s time to leave. You know the rest, I visited the pet shop, hardware shop, photo frame shop, even the supermarket. Then, as if it’s destined to be, I visited the David Jones warehouse last and guess what – I found this set of verrine glasses. Not exactly high quality, but I do like the high cylindrical shape.
Caramelised banana, frozen raspberry, and white chocolate truffle
Food Preparation/Creation
The longest part of the prep is the caramelisation of the banana pieces. After cutting the banana into small pieces, I rolled them on a bowl of caster sugar and use chopstick to pick it up and put it on the open flame to burn the sugar until it caramelised. And I have to do it one by one. I wish I had a butane flame blower to do this – much much quicker. Then I let them cool before I put them into the verrine.
The rest is really easy. A couple of pieces of raspberry and then the white choc truffle. I had this white choc truffle that my wife made as part of her French Pattisserie class (how convenient). Then I top it up it a mini mint leaves from my herb pot.
That all sound easy, but I did have to assemble the verrine twice. If you’ve dealt with frozen raspberry before, you’ll know that it doesn’t stay frozen too long. Adding on top of that, I was shooting on one the hottest day in Sydney that time (the temperature peaks at 41 degree Celcius that day). So what happened was I did my first verrine fine and beautiful with the truffle pop out a little bit higher than the verrine glass. As I prepare the scene and the props, etc the truffle has sunk to half the height of the verrine glass. The raspberry layer just get squashed as the raspberries reach the room temperature and become really soft. I decided to keep going and finalise my props before I make the second version. Gotta be quick with frozen stuff. That’s one of the hard part in shooting food stuff.
The Shooting
As with the props, I choose to put a cup of black coffee on the background along with a relatively sizeable sugar container. I wanted to convey the dinner mood at the dessert time. The sugar container sort of reinforce the “sweetness” of the dessert – at the same time balanced out by a black coffee, giving a bit of that coffee-bitter taste so that the overal scene is not to “sweet”.
I also deliberately choose black coloured coffee cup so it almost “blends” in with the dark background and doesn’t become distracting. With the big sugar container, I wasn’t quite sure about it initially because I thought it could be distracting because it’s going to look like a big bright blob at the background. But it kinda turned out ok I think. Maybe the neutral colour with some blurred writings on it makes it work. It sort of draw your eye away a bit from the verrine so forcing your eyes to explore the entire frame a bit more instead of just fixated on the verrine glass.
Camera is really at low angle this time to accentuate the height of the verrine. Also, with low angle, the layer is more visible as is, ie not “squashed” because of the high angle perspective. I did play a bit with exposure to make sure that the frozen ice layer on the raspberry is correctly exposed.
I covered the surface with black cloth to create the low key shot. Soft light is positioned at the usual 10 o’clock direction. Big reflector from 4 o’clock direction elevated quite high so it doesn’t produce a reflection on the glass. I also choose to use portrait orientation because I thought it goes better with the shape of the verrine.
Camera settings are 100mm at F5.6 1/4 second at ISO100.
Observation
A bit of reflection of coffee cup on the glass – again I left it as is. A spot highlight appears on the bottom right of the glass, casting a bright spotlight on the dark surface. I find it quite interesting. Obviously it comes from the softbox and get refracted that way. I’m still trying to get my feel on the type of the verrine glass that’s suitable for dessert or savoury. Some says tall verrines are good for savoury whereas low wide verrines are good for dessert. I deliberately make it the otherway around this time. What’s your take?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged light, food, reflector, fruit, cup, black, highlight, chocolate, white, verrine, low key, reflection, raspberry, dessert, sweet, dark, sugar, glass, contorni, postres, raspberries, white chocolate truffle, truffle, mint, leaves, frozen, banana, caramel, caramelised, carameliazed, coffee | Leave a Comment »
November 15, 2009 by Suwandi
I like strawberries. They give such a rich red colour in the photograph. Red is bold, red gets attention. That’s why I like it
.
This week is sweet verrine week, and I chose this one because of the rich red colour. Ok, ok, I also chose this because it seems easy to do, as I always did in my past verrine projects. Well, this one does indeed turn out to be quite easy to prepare. What’s more, the ingredient is quite easy to get – for me anyway because the strawberries are still in season.
Strawberries with basil and limoncello
Food Preparation
The preparation was relatively easy. I just diced up the strawberries and fill the verrine glass until approximately half full. Now since the strawberries that I got are not really ripe, the inside of the strawberries are still quite pale in colour. So I make sure that the diced up pieces are facing the right way so most of the pale colour side are facing away from the glass surface. But don’t overdo it though because it would look unnatural (that’s what I did first and the result looks a bit to engineered).
Once the glass is half full, I built a small “hill” using a couple of more pieces of diced strawberries to build the height into the assembly. Height is really important here because the camera is positioned really high in this setup. The hill is actually quite high (relatively speaking), it almost reached the height of the glass, but doesn’t appear like that in the final shot because the camera angle actually has a diminishing effect on height. That’s why I need to exagerate the height of th hill a little.
The basil slices are then put on top of the strawberries hill. I have to repeat this step several time before I find out that when the slice curve up (ie with both edge of the slice sticking upwards) will give a more appealing image.
Finally the diluted and sweetened limoncello was poured until it reaches the height where you can see the reasonable line of liquid from outside the glass wall.
If you’ve been reading my past entries on the verrine project, I always do my food shot on my kitchen bench. Well it’s convenient. But it also has a plain white reflective surface. It’s great for a clean high key shot. And if I need a low key shot I usually cover the surface up with black cloth like in this post. But this time I wanted to try something different. I want a patterned surface, like my dining table, to create a different mood. I wanted to create a feeling that people are just finishing up their main dessert during dinner and are about to wrap the fiesta up with this verrine. Well dinner is at night so I though low key will be more appropriate. And my dining table is dark colour too so I think it fits into the scheme.
I put a small dessert plate on the top left to convey the “just finished my main dessert” message. I just put some crumble so make the plate a bit messy, just like when we just finish our piece of cake on the plate. I think it works pretty well, what do you think?
I also put a verrine glass of whole strawberry at the background to support the scene. As I said in my last post, I quite like this style at the moment. I think adding the raw ingredient as part of the prop just make sense.
The glass of limoncello actually comes as the second thought. I mean I could have used a lemon slice into the scene as a prop because limoncello is supposed to be made of lemon right? But I thought maybe a glass of limoncello may go better, afterall, what could be more perfect than a glass of limoncello to wrap up the dinner with this verrine 
The shoot
A couple of days ago one of my fellow in Flickr whose nick name is Asta (you can visit his work here) wrote a comment on my chocolate mouse with orange shot that explain something that I didn’t even realise (consciously anyway). He said that the composition in the shot has a classic X composition structure. What he meant was that in that composition, you can typically find two main lines on the composition that intersect each other (forming an X – hence the name) where the main subject along with other important object (such as props) are positioned. Or put it simply, the important objects are places along the diagonal lines of the frame. This is closely related to the diagonal compositional rule that every photographers learns the first time they learn about composition.
Anyway, here I am using this composition structure again. I quite like it now that I’m concious about it. Here you can see the dessert plate, the limoncello glass and the main subject, the strawberries limoncello are aligned in one diagonal line. For the second diagonal I actually position the spoon along the line to make the line stronger. The glass containing the whole strawberries also lie along this line. By the way, the pattern on the table are also along the second diagonal line.
With the lighting, I need to position the softbox at around 8-9 o’clock this time instead of my usual 10 o’clock position. The reason is that the table surface is semi reflective. If I put the light on the 10 o’clock position there will be a bright spot on showing on the frame which I think will kill the night dinner mood. A big reflector are placed at around 4 o’clock, also elevated quite high to fill the light from above. Otherwise you’ll see the reflector’s reflection on the glass.
The camera is elevated quite high as mentioned before – almost 40-50cm above the main subject. I did this so that I can accentuate the basil leaves on top. The price you pay is that it make the strawberry “hill” much lower than it actually is.
As usual I used my 100mm macro set at F4 at 1/10 ISO100.
lighting setup
Observation
There is a little reflection “problem” here. First you can see that there is a small reflection of the spoon on the limoncello glass. I don’t mind this one, since it gives some dimension to the otherwise pretty flat looking glass. If you don’t like the reflection you may need to reposition the light a bit or use gobo to block the light falling onto the spoon. Otherwise you can use spoon made of other non-reflective material as substitute.
Second reflection is the reflection of the limoncello glass on the left side of the main strawberry glass. Again it’s quite subtle and I didn’t bother to get rid of it. I’m not even sure how to do it apart of photoshop it out.
NOW COMES THE TWISTS
I actually lied about two things in the food preparation section. Can you spot what they are?
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
November 9, 2009 by Suwandi
Welcome back. We are back to savoury verrine this time. I seem to fall again and again into the same trap. I chose this from the Verrine book by Jose Marecal because it seems easy. To add to that the ingredients look easy to procure. How wrong I was. I usually start the project by blindly following the recipe. I mean don’t get me wrong – that’s exactly what you should do if you want to make the verrine to be consumed. But sometimes, well, most of the time, to make a food fit to be photographed, you need to be ready to “bend” the recipe.
Now, I know I’m touching a very sensitive issue here. What I mean is this: There are two types of food photographer. The first type is what I called the “purists”. They insist shooting the food “as is”, made without any modification to the recipe. This is sort of an equivalent of a “candid” shot in the world of portrait photography.
The other type is the what I called the “fashionist”. Their goal is to make the food look best in the final image, and are prepared to do whatever modification needed in the process of the food preparation – and more often than not will render to food inedible. They do things like spraying glycerin on top of pancakes so that the honey on the top doesn’t get absorbed into the pancake and therefore make it “saggy”. Yes, things like that.
Which one is better? None, really. Each has their own good and bad. But I find that I need to be able to switch back and forth between this type to really produce an acceptable food shot – like in this project, as we shall see. But here is the final shot.
Butterfly pasta (farfalle) with vegetables
Food creation/preparation
As mentioned before, initially I followed th recipe to make the verrine – ala the “purist”. I pan fried the eggplant with some olive oil that serves as the bottom layer. I also pan fried some slices of zucchini for the second layer – again with some olive oil. Finally, I boiled the butterfly pasta - until al dente of course – in some salt and olive oil – as it’s supposed to be.
You can see that I mentioned olive oil a lot of time, because – as you may already guess it – that’s the thing that causes me grieve when assembling the verrine. They just make the glass so smudgy. I spend litterally hours to make a reasonable arrangement for shooting. And even after that, I have to spend hours in post processing to remove the little oil drops that sticks on the inner glass wall. And worse, at the end, I just don’t think it’s good enough. So I decided to remake it again – with the “fashionist” approach.
The second time around, I went pretty radical. The eggplant base layer is raw, and also the zucchini slices. Being raw make the assembling so much easier and they don’t seem to leave nasty oily marks on the glass wall. Also, the raw eggplant is more “solid” compared to the pan-fried-with-olive-oil version which is much softer much like a saggy sofa for the layer above. The solid raw version proof to provide a good base for the second layer of zucchini. It sort of prevent the zucchini slices to sink into the eggplant layer.
The same thing applies for the zucchini slices. Raw slices are much more solid, ie not as soft – this in turn provide a good base for the pasta and tomato halves on the top layer.
For a bit more decoration I put a couple of pine nuts under the grill of few minutes to bring out the dark orangish colour. And for the final steps, I poured the olive oil so it soaks down into the base layer. The eggplant will just absorbs the oil, giving the appearance that it’s just been cooked.
Props
I decided to go high key this time and in portrait orientation. This leaves me with quite a lot of empty spaces on the top of the frame, so I scatter some of the raw ingredients that makes up the verrine arround the empty space. I think it works quite well. I’m really warming up to this approach now – ie prop with the raw ingredients. We’ll see how well it work in the next project.
The shooting
Camera is set to F4 at 1/20 ISO200. As usual, I use my 100mm macro to shoot this. I decided to set the angle a bit higher so that the top part is a little bit more visible. Lighting is placed at 10 o’clock direction, but quite elevated – it’s pointing down approximately 45 degree to the subject. I am trying to get the top ring of the glass to lit up. Well it does, but the effect is not as visible because the high key setup. Maybe I’ll try again in the next low key project. A big reflector at 4 o’clock direction, also held quite high so it doesn’t form a reflection on the surface of the glass.
I didn’t take a shot of the setup this time – I didn’t remember until I almost finish clean up! I’ll try to remember next time.
Observation
I actually change the glass between my first (failed) attempt to the second. In the first attempt the glass that I used has quite a thick wall. I found this to be a disadvantage. When the glass is thick, and say you put a haf-tomato facing the glass wall, the tomato appear to “float” in the glass. In the final shot above I used a glass with thin wall. I think it works quite well.
Going back to the “purist” vs “fashionist” discussion, I really think being able to switch back and forth is a great advantage. To say the purists are wrong is like saying that shooting candid shot of people are non-sense. Equivalently, to say the fashionists are wrong is like saying people cannot put on make up to be photographed. I probably put myself more on the fashionist side – which side are you on?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aubergine, basil, butterfly pasta, eggplant, farfalle, fashionist, food, food photography, garlic, high key, light, pasta, pesto, pine nuts, prop, purist, reflection, reflector, softbox, spatula, stick, styling, vegetables, verrine, zucchini | 2 Comments »
November 2, 2009 by Suwandi
Alright, I finally found a set of 6 small glasses that I think might work with this project. They are actually being sold as a dessert wine glass but hey, does it really matter? and the good thing is they are stemless. This helps a lot in terms of avoiding reflection (as I had a lot of difficulty getting rid of in
my previous post). I’ll talk more about this later.
This week’s verrine will be a sweet one (I plan to alternate between savoury and sweet). I chose this one because it *seems* to be easy to make, but it turns out that I spent more time preparing the food than shooting it.
Rice Pudding, Raspberry, and Speculaas
Food Preparation
First layer is the rice pudding layer. Simple ingredients (milk, cream and sugar. Well, rice of course). But it takes quite a while to get the rice softened and cooled. I’m not sure where I went wrong but the pudding becomes really sticky – kind of a glue sticky. Which is alright, I found it easier to “control” when I need to put them in the verrine glass. Again, you really need to wait until the pudding is cooled otherwise the verrine glass turn really foggy. Now, even though I said it’s easier to control, since the glass opening is so small, the puddings are sticking everywhere on the inside of the glass. Here WINDEX proofs to be my friend in need (apart from rendering the food inedible). I also found that I need to use chopstick to “press” the pudding against the inner glass surface to avoid any air bubble appearing from outside.
Second layer is the raspberry. In the recipe the raspberry is semi-crushed and jelly-fied (new word?). Same challange here when stuffing the raspberry layer, you just need to keep cleaning the glass inner surface after each layer. Also, I found that maintaining a clear separation between the rice pudding layer and the raspberry layer quite hard. Lucky the rice pudding is quite sticky so the jelly doesn’t “sink” into it. Again I need to “press” the jelly to the inner glass wall otherwise air bubbles will be visible from outside.
Top part is easy. Crushed speculaas carefully poured on top. Again, the crumble will sit better if the raspberry layer is set pretty firm, otherwise it will “sink” into it. With the crumble, make sure that when pouring it falls straight onto the jelly and not on the glass. It’s really hard to clean the crumbles that sticks on the glass wall because if you move/tilt the glass the main crumble layer will collapse.
I finished off with a couple of pieces of fresh raspberry. I moist them a bit so they can appear shinny on the surface.
Shooting
I did try several setup. In fact, I did try to shot above in high key, but I like the dark version more. It gives a “dinner” mood. The high key one give a sense of “morning” or “breakfast”, and I don’t think this dessert is suitable at 10am.
This time I put the softbox on the 9 o’clock direction with big mirror on the 4-5 o’clock direction. I also choose the black surface to contrast the white-ish rice pudding and the white saucer plate.
Note that since the verrine glass is stemless and therefore less “curvy” at the bottom, the reflection is not too bad. It still reflects some light from the surrounding, but not to the extend it’s distracting the visibility of the layers. In fact, you’ll probably want some reflection otherwise it will look rather unnatural.
Camera setting is at f4.5 1/20 ISO100 at 100mm. The camera position is elevated a bit – approx 15-20cm above the surface of the subject. I’ve included a snapshot of the setup.
Lighting Setup
The tripod on the left is where the camera position was (there is no camera there because I need to camera to shoot this setup). Also you can’t see the reflector because I actually hand held the reflector when I shoot so obviously I have to put the reflector down when I shoot this setup
Observation
You can see on the background I placed a porcelain milk container as a prop. Now that milk container get reflected (refracted?) onto the bottom of the glass. You can see the inverted image of the milk containter there. I don’t mind it there, but it got me thinking, what should I do if I’m in the situation where I need to get rid of it? The light must have been reflected off the milk container surface, travelled through the bottom layer of the glass, and onto the camera lens – the bottom part of the glass effectively act as a big fat lens itself. Maybe I can put some kind of flag or gobo in between the milk container and the back of the verrine glass to block the light. That might work as long as the flag/gobo doesn’t interfere with the shot (ie not in the frame). Any other ideas?
Also for any of you who has the Verrines book by Jose Morechal, you’ll find that the one in the book is quite different from the one I posted here. The one in the book has the raspberry layer interlacing with the rice pudding layer creating quite a nice pattern. Any idea how to do this? I did try it but as you can guess, I failed miserably. Maybe the jelly is too firm I don’t know. But if anybody can throw some light that would be great! Being a food stylist is not an easy job at all.
Couda
As suggested, this is the high-key “morning” version that I mentioned before. My preference is the low key one. See if you like this one better.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged biscuits, black, cream, dark, dessert, dinner, fresh, fruit, high key, light, low key, milk, prop, pudding, raspberry, reflection, reflector, rice, rice pudding, softbox, speculaas, sugar, sweet, verrine | 3 Comments »
October 24, 2009 by Suwandi
Ok, finally I got started on this rather ambitious project. It’s actually quite a bumpy start. You know to start the verrine project the first I thought I should find is obviously the verrines. By the way for you who don’t know – verrines are type of dishes that is served in small glasses. It is derived from the french word “verre” which means “glass”. Quite popular now especially in the restaurants that serve modern western dishes.
Anyway, so I began the quest to find the verrines by visiting the major store like David Jones, Myers – and I found nothing. Then I tried the popular kitchenware warehouse Victoria Basement – and I found nothing. Ebay – nothing! Then I google “verrine buy” and finally I found several website that sell different set of small glasses. Most of them are french or british website. “Yay!” I thought, happily add the items to the shopping cart and proceed to check out – and guess what – they don’t deliver to Australia! It happens that all website that I found either only deliver locally or don’t deliver to Australia. They say its our Custom, they are too strict. Great, big speed hump before I even get started.
So you all have to excuse me that this first verrine project is not really made in a verrine. I just use whatever glass I have that I think is reasonable. So here we go.
Niçoise crumble with goat cheese cream
Food Creation/Preparation
This is also the first food shot that I have to make from scratch. Well when I say “I have to make from scratch” I usually mean “I read the recipe about 5 times and attempted to make it myself but then I make a big mess in my kitchen and my wife jump in and take it over from there – meanwhile I start setting up my camera”. I still find it fun tough, not sure what my wife think.
As the title implied, this verrine starts with a ratatouille as the base, followed by a think layer of goat cheese cream, then another layer of Nicoise crumble on the top. One tip that I can give here is that when putting food into a clear kitchenware such as a glass for photography purpose, let the food cool to room temperature before putting them in. Otherwise the inner side of the glass will become foggy and you can’t see clearly through the glass. Unless of course that’s the effect that you want.
In the first attempt, the second layer (the cream cheese layer) quickly sip through the base layer because the base is not dense enough. The result is that there is no clear and clean separation between the base and the second layer. So we have to start over. This time we really compact the base layer until it’s really dense before pouring the second layer. This time it works ok, although I still think if you want a cleaner separation you need another technique. One technique that I can think of is to pour a liquid jelly on top of the base layer and let the jelly set. This will then became a rather solid base for the second layer to sit on. Other trick may be to spray glycerin on top the first layer. I’ll give it a go next time.
Second layer is not as difficult but you really need to be careful so that the cream doesn’t touch the area of the glass that you don’t want to (such as the tip). It’s really difficult to clean, you can’t really use napkin to wipe it off because it’s greasy (well, cmon, it’s cream!) We use Windex to clean the glass – and gloriously render to batch inedible.
The Shooting
As usual, it takes probably good half an hour to come up with a composition that I like. I decide to do a low key shot this time since all my previous food shot is rather high key. I also got this nice table mat as a base to cover off my blindingly white kitchen bench. Shooting a low key shot on a reflective white surface is rather challenging.
I positioned the softbox rather high, 11 o’clock direction and a big reflector on the approx 2 o’clock direction to lighten up the crumble on the top. The most challenging part of this shot for me is to reduce the reflection on the glass surface. As I mentioned before the kitchen bench is white, so you can see it pretty clear on the glass surface. Now I don’t have a big black cloth so 3 of my black T-shirt need quite a bit of washing after I sacrifice them to be used to cover my kitchen bench. Even after that you can still see some reflection from the stuff that I can’t cover (such as the white plate etc). Now if you know how to get rid of the reflection completely in this kind of setup would you pleeaaaasseeeee let me know. I still can’t figure it out.
I use my usual 100mm macro, and set the f-stop to 3.5 so I can get a nice blur on the book on the background. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s the book that contain all the recipe for this project.
What’s next
I’m thinking to alternate between savoury and sweets so next one will most likely be a sweet verrine. I hope I have the proper verrine glass by then. If you know where I can buy them AND deliver them to Australia, please please please let me know
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged black, blur, cloth, cream, crumble, foggy, french, glycerine, goat cheese, grease, jelly, layer, light, low key, napkin, Niçoise, ratatouille, reflection, reflector, small glasses, softbox, verrine, windex | 6 Comments »
October 20, 2009 by Suwandi
Yes I’m back, takes a while to catch up since we’re back from Japan. Beautiful place though, lots to see. I’ve posted some photo in
here,
here, and
here.
And yes, it’s been a while since I update this blog. I was sort of struggling to come up with ideas. It’s sort of an irony because we just came back from Japan, and you know what, Japan is full of ideas when it comes to food. Just go down to any department store and you’ll find a full floor dedicated for foods. Myriads of different bento boxes, pickles, tempura, karage, you name it. Sweets are very enticing especially their packaging. The thing is you can’t really bring them back to shoot it.
I have to say, coming up with an idea of what to shoot is probably the hardest part of the process. Once I found the idea the process just flows. I tell myself somehow I need to solve this problem and get a constant flow of ideas so to keep the blog more “alive”. Incidently we went to watch a movie yesterday. The movie was “Julie and Julia”. Well, suddenly a big-thousand-watt-idea-light-bulb just clicked in my head. Why don’t I do the same? Well not exactly the same but I can just buy a cooking book or something similar then that would be my flow of ideas! Now I’m not a cook, not even close to it. My wife will heartfully testify for this. But I remember browsing thru bookstore and flip thru a book on starters and sweets in small glasses. The book is titled “Verrines” by José Maréchal.
verrines
The photographer for the book is Akiko Ida. She has a fantastic gallery in her website.
Now the idea of “starters” in “small” glass sounds less scary than the almighty Gordon Ramsay cook book. I’m sure it’s not as easy as it sounds but I’m gonna give it a try – so keep watch!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Akiko Ida, foods, glasses, japan, Jose Marechal, project, small, small glasses, sweets, verrines | Leave a Comment »
September 23, 2009 by Suwandi
This is going to be my last post before I go away for 2 weeks to Japan. Yeah I’m planning to take lots of food photo there but that’s latter.
This time it is about salami. I am thinking of creating a salami platter. One of the tricks that I learned about shooting meat slices is that to fold the slices so that it has some form and height (instead of just lying dead flat on the plate).
So there you go, I send my wife off to a salami discovery mission. She knows of a place in a little suburb called Summer Hills called Il Villagio that sells really good salami. I mean you can get “OK” salami easily but this one is delicacy. She brought home three different types of salami for me to experiment on. Boy she knows what I want.
Then I start folding the slices. They are quite delicate to handle because some of the slices are so thin that it “collapse” when you fold it and becomes flat. Not a good shape for shooting. I mostly fold the slices into half so it resemble a semi circle shape. But once I did that for all the slices and try to arrange them on the board, I found them to be a bit boring. I want to make something different – something that “pops”. What else can I do with the slice of meat? Ideas: cut in half, put the folded slices on top of each other and punch a tooth pick through them so they can stay in shape, roll them into a cylinder, etc. The “rolling” seems like a good idea at that time so I went for it.
I also planned to arrange to rolled slices into some unusual arrangement. But it proof to be more difficult than I thought. The rolled slices flattened when I put other rolled slices on top of each other, simply because they are too thin. You know what? Let’s stick a small dried olive inside each of the roll. Viola, the rolled slices become as solid as a wood log. Another trick I that I picked up along the way.
Salami Platter
All I need now is some props. I just use what I had at hand, bit of olive, crackers and cheese cubes.
Lighting
This time I put the soft light at 10 o’clock direction and really low. Almost at the subject level. You can see the highlight it created on the left group of salami. I also want to light up the red bit of the olive a bit, like I did in my
olive post. Mirror to fill light from the top, another mirror on the 4 o’clock and 2 o’clock to fill in shadow. The 2 o’clock mirror is useful to brighten the rolled salami and bring it to life.
Camera Setting
I use my 100mm macro this time at F4 1/20 ISO100. As you can see the camera angle are pretty low, to bring the arrangement of hte rolled salami slices out more. I set to focus on one of the surface of the standing rolled salami and leave everything else out of focus.
Opinion
Now some people might find this kind of arrangement really unusual. I mean, traditionally, salami platter is set on some wooden board, serve with bread and wine etc. They are folded or laid flat on the board – ie they are never arranged in the way I did above. Well, I leave it up to you to judge – feed backs are always welcome! I do agree though I probably should have some bread in the shot. Well, I just need toanother excuse to go to Il Villagio…
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bamboo, board, bread, camera, cheese, collapse, crackers, cube, cylinder, fill, flat, fold, folded, food, geometry, height, il Villagio, italian, italy, light, low angle, meat, mirror, olive, platter, punch, roll, rolled, salami, shadow, slice, soft, stick, styling, summer hills, techniques, thin, toothpick, traditional, tricks, wine, wooden | 1 Comment »
September 15, 2009 by Suwandi
I finally got time to create a new post after a crazy week at work. Maintaining a constant stream of posts can really be challanging
Anyway, when we were doing our usual groceries shopping at Coles I spotted a plate of profiteroles on sales (maybe because they are close to expiry date?) and viola, they become my next project.
The profiteroles are kind of hard to handle. You really don’t want to touch the chocolate part because you are going to see your finger print on it when you do a close up (can you find my finger print in the shot?)
I started of with usual close up of 3 profiteroles stacked rather randomly on a plate, but again, too boring. So I figure, why don’t I put them in a row? Ideally I’d put them in a long flat rectangular serving plate, but I didn’t have that handy that time. Well time to improvise. I use a white cloth and folded it into a long serving base. Quite happy with that since it shows the folds in the shot which I think add another interesting segment.
Profiteroles in a row
I don’t know why I chose 5 profiteroles in the row, but somehow I think odd number is more interesting. I think it has to do with the human nature. Now this is going to get a bit philosophical – but human being generally find a feeling of inner balance when perceiving something that has a high degree of symmetry. Things like even number, polygon with same size on their sides, regular shapes, etc. That is also why in photography, we are always told NOT to put the main subject in dead centre. Now this might sound a bit contradictory, I mean I just mentioned that symmetry would generally invoke inner balance feeling. The explanation is this: when you put your subject in the centre, the audience will see your subject and reach that balance feeling. But then, that’s the end of it – and the audience will quickly lose interest. It’s like there isn’t enough challenge or tension going on. That’s exactly what we DON’T want to happen. We want to keep the audience’s eye stuck onto our photo for as long as possible. That’s why we deliberate disturb the symmetry by putting the subject OFF centre. The audience will then detect the asymmetry, causing tension. That’s what is keeping the audience’s eyes stuck on the photo.
Disturbing the symmetry comes in different way. Putting subject off centre is one. Positioning subject along the diagonal line is another. Perfect horizontal or vertical lines are generally boring. Diagonals are more interesting because they disturbs the symmetry.
Anyway – back to our profiteroles. So I choose to use 5 pieces – 3 seems to be too little in number, 7 seems to be too long for a row. I was tossing between landscape or portrait shots. I settle with portrait because I can accentuate the diagonal. I think human is acustomed to have a wide angle view (normal sight angle is more than 90 degree left to right, where as top to bottom is much less than that). Again this might be an homo sapien’s evolutionary trait because survival depends more on being able to scan your surrounding for threat quickly at your eye level. But I digress.
Lighthing: as usual softbox on the left. This time I really need to boost the light on the right side of the profiteroles on the back. Otherwise they look really dark. I have to put the mirror very close to them. I also use reflective aluminium foil to bring the specular highlight on the top of the profiteroles.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged chocolate, cloth, desert, diagonal, even, evolution, fold, food, food styling, highlight, human nature, inner balance, light, lighting, mirror, number, odd, off centre, pastry, photography, plate, poligon, profiteroles, prop, rectangular, reflector, regular, sight, snack, specular, styling, symmetry, tension, white | Leave a Comment »
September 10, 2009 by Suwandi
I’m just having a bit of fun with the birthday cake that my wife got from her birthday. I think it’s some kind of rum cake with a sliced pineapple in the middle and a slice of straweberry on top. The cake is really soaked into the rum and taste really juicy.
Pineapple birthday cake
As usual, before my wife and I begin gobbling up the cake I decided to take some shots of it. The cake is covered with sweeten rum that make it very reflective, so I decided put a big light over to make a strong highlight on the side of the cake.
As you can see from the strong highlight on the side of the cake, the light is positioned very close to the cake. I also play around with a mirror to create the strong highlight on the strawberry.
Did you see the black band in the background? That’s an accident I forgot to put a white backdrop at the back, but I thought it turns out quite interesting, what do you think?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged backdrop, birthday, black, cake, cup, expresso, food, food photography, food styling, fork, highlight, light, lighting, napkin, photography, pineapple, prop, rum, strawbery, styling | Leave a Comment »
September 8, 2009 by Suwandi
- carafoli
You can’t say that you’re in the food styling industry if you don’t know this gentlemen named John F. Carafoli. He is a world class New York based food stylist. His book “Food Photography and Styling” has been regarded as the ‘bible’ of those who want to get their hand dirty in the food styling/photography industry.
Carafoli's food styling book
You can visit John Carafoli website here. Pretty cool gallery there on the website. This is one of my favourite:
carafoli sample
John also teaches and lectures in cooking and food styling in various well known institution such as Boston University’s Seminars in the Culinary Arts.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, book, boston univeristy, cooking, culinary, food, food styling, food stylist, international, john carafoli, master, new york, photography, recipe | Leave a Comment »
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