Tag: food photography

Scavenger Hunt #30 – Upside Down

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For “Upside Down”, I zeroed on the “upside down cake” interpretation fairly quickly – I just missed a recipe and an occasion, and both presented themselves during the time of the hunt. The usual “upside down cake” in France would be Tarte Tatin (upside down apple pie) but I wanted the concept to be recognizable by the larger Scavenger audience, so I went for a pineapple recipe, which looked like the most common meaning of the concept 🙂

I went for Nigella’s recipe: Pineapple Upside Down Cake, and it was (to my taste at least) absolutely fantastic cake 🙂 I messed up a bit on two occasions: a/ I used syrupy cherries instead of candied cherries (because candied cherries are actually surprisingly hard to get here – although since then I found them 😉 ) b/ I put too much of them in places they didn’t belong – which means they kind of bled through the pineapple. I also made the initial mistake of not centering the cake on the plate when I first removed it from the pan, and moving it to a more central position involved a lot of care.

Still, I made a lot of pictures, and that’s the one I ended up choosing. Some were better just after I got it from the pan because it was still steaming, but, well, see previous point about centering. It also took me a fair amount of trial and errors to get an angle I was happy with.

CameraPentax K-1 II
LensSigma 28mm F1.8 EX DG Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length28mm
F-NumberF/10
Exposure time1/20 s
ISO800

The edits were on the slightly more involved side of things because I wanted the background to be a clean black (and it wasn’t in the original picture, due to KITCHEN). I also went for a less purple aspect of the cherry bleeding, which felt better to me. I do regret a bit not seeing that I had lost significant light in the cherries on the border – could have been better on the edit there!

For all the interpretations of the word from my fellow Scavengers: the Upside Down album.

52Frames – 2020-42 – Food photography

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was Food photography. I used to do quite a lot of food/kitchen photography-related photography a few years ago; I don’t do it nearly as much now, but I still have some taste (pun intended) for it.

I knew that there would be baking this week-end (it’s my husband’s birthday 😉 ), so I waited for that and followed him in the kitchen with my camera. When it comes to food photography, I always preferred the “action” shots to the “food stylist” pictures – less pretty, for sure, but more realistic 😉

The light in the kitchen this afternoon was fairly bad – although we have great natural light in this room, the weather is pretty gloomy, and our lighting is not up to photography tasks, and I got wayyyy to lazy to add some proper lights in the way of the baking (for which I wasn’t responsible!). I’m still quite happy with the overall mood I managed to get with that shot – and I like the texture of the pie. It’s not an AMAZING picture, but I don’t hate it 😉

Scavenger Hunt #29 – Egg

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CameraPentax K-1 II
Lenssmc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mmF2.8 WR
Focal length100mm
F-NumberF/16
Exposure time1/20 s
ISO400

For a theme as “concrete” as “Egg”, I like to try to extract a somewhat “abstract” interpretation of the image. Macro/close-up is an easy way to do that, and that’s how my Eggs turned out. I basically took the box of eggs out of the fridge, set up a tripod, played with lights, and started shooting. Condensation started to appear pretty quickly, and I thought it added an interesting texture on the eggs – although it took me a few tries to get the light right. The egg carton also gave an interesting texture – I was happy to manage to focus reasonably on it.

I think that without the SOOC constraint I would probably have handled this one in B&W. From the same set of pictures, I think I would have submitted this one:

I think the light was slightly better, but I’ve had to fix the angles and crop before getting this one. And I also fixed a couple of imperfections that I’m probably the only one seeing 😉 I’m pretty sure I would have convinced myself that B&W was the right choice to emphasize the abstract, buuut I think I like the color one better now!

And the album with all the pictures of my Scavenger Hunt fellows is here: Egg.