Little bites
Nov. 19th, 2008 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snouslePictures 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 07:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 07:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 10:58 am (UTC)Beautiful!
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 02:25 pm (UTC)How does this look on your monitor?
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 03:00 pm (UTC)All three look great, but the sausage, pepper, and mushrooms look wonderful in particular.
One rationalization for using "fakery" is that the camera just doesn't record what the human eye would see, particularly in terms of white constancy and color constancy. The rice in the sushi would be perceived by the viewer as being white when viewed (so to speak) live, but the camera records it as grey. I totally get your aversion to artificially adjusting the food's appearance, but I also think there are good justifications for compensating for the idiosyncracies of the photographic medium. (And yes, I do talk like that).
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 03:56 pm (UTC)Is there a reason not to wrap the sushi logs before transport? I have often made Futomaki and transported it to an event. I will either bring it in wrapped logs and slice there, or pre-slice, re-assemble and wrap in either wax paper or cooking parchment.
Transporting the rice logs sans wrapping might be difficult. The prawns look great but what s the count size? $0.40 each seems steep.
When I used to do catering in Chicago, I would always balance my high end items with a couple of low end items. That way I still made a profit in average.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 04:20 pm (UTC)- tilt the image 3 degrees and crop it to a) cut across the lines of the plate and 2) crop off the vignetting
- run sharpen across it a couple of times at a 0.5 px diameter
This is all Pshop but there are serious image manipulation tools available on the web for free, you can probably find them fairly easily.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 04:56 pm (UTC)as above
as above +5% saturation
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 06:13 pm (UTC)I think I will try to find some software for handling raw images.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 11:04 pm (UTC)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 ;-)*
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 05:51 pm (UTC)oops I meant
http://www.flickr.com/groups/52240578442@N01/