Grey Matter Concept

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?