.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?
