Little bites

[snousle]

Pictures of appetizers.



Here's three appetizers I'm testing for the Eagle event on Saturday. I'm sort of blowing the food budget - those dang prawns are, like, .40 each. Profit? Who, me?

Anyway, I'm starting to run tests that simulate the abuse various foods will take during actual events. I've made the decision to never transport hot food, which is unusual. I'm working with smallish round chafing dishes from Crate + Barrel that look reasonably sharp for $100 a pop, and they pack up easily. They can heat a 2 Kg pan of food from fridge temp to serving temperature in just about an hour, and the fuel keeps burning for another hour beyond that.

In the spirit of relentless honesty, these, along with all my marketing photos, are exactly what gets served to clients - the sushi I cheated on slightly, because I'm still working out the details, but the prawns and sausage bits had already been chilled and reheated before I took the photos. Maybe that's going too far, but I'm so repulsed by the fakery of marketing that I feel the need to at least try to represent things as they really are.

The improvements here are the consistent use of white-balance calibration, and the addition of a small halogen desk lamp for a key light. The white setting turns out to be really important, but it's not obvious what surfaces are "true" white. The fabric I shoot on is a little on the creamy side, while these plates, along with printer paper and the top of the freezer, tend to be a little blue. My best guess at a truly neutral surface is kosher salt. (I suppose I could buy a gray card, but where's the fun in that?)

Color is improved here, but reddish objects are still a problem. They tend to fuse into one featureless mass, as you can see in the prawns. But the sausage bits represent a great improvement over what I've obtained in the past.

Here's smoked salmon and cucumber sushi. I'm working on a method of transporting a rice "log" that gets wrapped in nori at the last moment. Yeah, it's a heresy, but lets see how it works. These were rolled in the conventional way:



Prawns and kentucky ham with tomato curry glaze. I sear these in a very hot grill pan so that they're still almost raw but have nice grill marks. Then they finish cooking during the reheat process. The texture is not perfect but it's reasonable. I think they will benefit from harder grilling.



Grilled italian sausage, red pepper, and shiitake mushrooms. Very easy, very delicious.



The web page is coming along. I think it will pay to take the time to get it right. It's way more time than I'd expected, but then I'm aiming higher than I had planned. There is no point in doing anything half-assed here. Maybe I'll have it up before this weekend's event.

Comments

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

looks good - especially the last one.

What Bill said basically. Although if you can get another keylight, maybe pointing the opposite direction to the other keylight, or on the background to reflect onto the back of the dishes...I think that might look better (getting it good in lighting always looks better than Photoshp fix, although it's always a bit of both, and a trade off, but doing the former right means more to play with in the latter usually).

I used to do studio (people) stuff with two lights, one (key)light can look a bit artificial - usually there are many lights or reflections in play especially in a kitchen and I'd guess you want that bright busy kitchen 'zing'?

Oh and I think the white is fine just pulled up on the top end as Bill did - great thing about digital is you don't really have to worry too much about temperatures, or slight off-whites, you can tweak it after.

I tend to cheat and use the Levels white dropper tool *Bill now throws something at me ;-)*

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

if it works it's not cheating ...