Grey Matter Concept

Food Creation and Preparation

The cooking is easy. The zucchini is chopped into inches, boiled, then processed using food processor. To my surprise, the puree come out straight with enough consistency for easy filling into the verrine – not to runny, not to viscous. Now, since this was originally cooked as a real dish, I boiled the zucchini in chicken broth to give a bit of flavour. The consequence is that it becomes oily, and it is really a pain if it sticks on the the part of the glass that is supposed to be clean. Windex helped, but still pain.

The rest is straight forward. Put a bit of mayo and dried and finely chopped coriander on top.

Food Preparation

Composition

As I said before, I am feeling creative today. Repetition can be boring, but sometimes it reinforces ideas. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Six identical verrines in the frame and that’s it. No other prop this time, only repetition (or pattern if you like) of the six verrine in some arrangement. Now this is a classic curve that leads the eye from the background spiraling clockwise to the foreground and end up at the bottom left of the frame. It looks quite natural to me, but I am wondering if left handed people would find counter-clockwise arrangement more natural. Anyone?

 The Shooting

Camera angle is normal, ie approx 25-30 cm above the surface set at F4 at 1/50 ISO100. Light is at 9 o’clock with reflector at 4 o’clock. I really need to play around with the position of the light and the reflector to make sure that the main subject – ie the glass in front - has a clearly visible edge definition. Glass is hard to be photographed in this sense. If the positioning of the lighting is not right, the glass seems to “blend” in with the backgroun (because it’s transparent). There is this technique that I read in the book “Light: Science and Magic” by Fil Hunter and Paul Fuqua. They dedicate a whole chapter detailing how to light transparent objects so that the edge definition is clearly visible. Highly recommended.

Lighting Setup

Observation

As I mentioned before, repetition can be boring but sometime it can reinforce ideas. There is a subtle balance between them. To many of them, the repetition become boring. To few, the reinforcement of the idea just didn’t happen. What I believe also, particularly in this case, is the number of item in the repetition. In my previous post about profiteroles, I mentioned that I prefered to use an odd number of item in the repetition since it is somehow “off balance” because it’s not even and therefore makes thing interesting. I did start with 5 verrines in this setup but then when I play around with 6, I think it turned out to be ok too. So even number works as well, but I can’t really pinpoint what or when to use odd or even. Maybe the fact that it arrangement is curved has influence on it. Any takers?