Photo Recipe

Today we have a short one, bringing together my two great loves: food and photography. In fact, this very blog had started with a food-photography post I put up almost four years ago!

This time I wanted to participate in a photographic-recipe contest arranged by the student body at my institute. I don't know if the contest ever did happen or if I just missed the deadline, but I was making food one day and decided to document some of the process.

It took me twice as long to make the damn thing because I had to stop and fidget with the flash for some of these shots... but once the food was cooking I didn't have that much time for setting it up just right, and when it was ready I wasn't thinking about the pictures anymore - I was way too hungry!

A list of ingredients + instructions after the break...

Madison (why I love my new Nikon)

I haven't been uploading recently, and there's a ton of new stuff waiting to come up to this blog. I hope I will get it pretty much in order, and anyway, it's better late than never.

So, going back to May 2015 I had flown to Wisconsin for a conference and some work with the collaboration I was part of. Like every trip abroad this is a chance to see and photograph new sceneries and people, and to act like a tourist and take pictures of absolutely everything.

This was my first chance to try out my new Nikon D610, which performed beautifully and, even though I still love my old D90, did let me do some new things I couldn't get away with using the old technology and crop sensor...

So just a small selection of images from the lovely Madison, WI. If you like this kind of thing, I will link to a few facebook albums with some more images.

Chocolate Shop

This week I have the last project I did for 2012, photographing a candy shop in Ramat Gan. The interior design is due to the talented Adi Erlich, and you can find these images as well as a few others on her website.



This was a rather small room so I had to work wide. Also, a couple of the images are actually panoramas (one of them is easy to detect, the other a bit more subtle). Besides, a few shots of the very artistic chocolates and a bit on how they were made, after the jump...

Cook Night

So this week I went out to photograph a friend's cook night. This was in the spirit of reality TV cooking shows, where the guys divide into two groups and have to cook as many tasty dishes as possible within the time limit.

So I ran around for a couple of hours trying to capture people  and all the cooking action going on, holding my camera in one hand and a flash on a short extension pole in the other.

In this kind of situation the 17-50 lens is invaluable, as it lets you take wide shots of everyone, and sometimes take interesting angles (for example, from the direction of the stove and up at the cook) or go to 50 mm for a portrait over the length of the table.

Anyway, here's a selection of the night's best shots:

Macarons

Besides the obvious benefits of going on photo shoots with models and make-up artists and other photographers, like I did a few weeks ago, there is also the advantage of meeting new people. This, like the many facebook groups for local photographers, opens up new opportunities to photograph things.

In this case I went to a friend I met at the above-mentioned photo shoot, to photograph a workshop on making `macarons': a kind of French dessert which is both tasty and colorful (two things I especially look out for when invited to photograph food...).

This workshop has a very casual atmosphere, and the food preparation is half-way between baking and playing... in a word: fun!

Food and Flashes

Doing homework for Strobist instead of homework for school... Taking pictures while making food and trying for once to give my shots a real 'studio' quality. I must say this was a lot of fun...

Conceptions change. If you had asked me what my opinion was about photshopping images when I was just starting with my first digital camera I would be very much against it. "The photograph has to represent reality as it is" and all those opinions I still hear. Since then I have moved on to use Lightroom regularly and even when I was traveling I did some RAW format editing post-capture inside the D90. Today I have no doubt that making these adjustments to a photo is just another step in the process. Which brings me to another conception I had about photography: natural light, unposed subjects and pretty much no planning of pictures at all, for the "natural picture".



This works out pretty well when traveling, especially if you can't afford to stay in one place for three days just to catch the perfect light on the mountain top - which is what I should be doing if I want to "pose" the landscape for the picture. You take the mountains, villagers and wildlife as it comes along, which was just fine for everything I did in Nepal last year (examples: https://picasaweb.google.com/112701265842357765172).


However, things changed when I finally bought my first strobe. The SB700 is a small, easy to use and optically wireless flash (fully compatible with my D90). This and reading along Strobist lighting 101 and now 102, got me doing a lot of new stuff.