Mincepies and notes on suet
Not being quite English I have a problem with the classic Christmas mince pie.
Certainly the standard mincemeat mixture is far too sweet for my palate and the usual thick doughy pastry has always seemed most unenticing, and then they have always given me indigestion, which I used to put down to the rich mix of fruits but I now realise was a part of my then unidentified gluten intolerance.
This year I have tried to see if I can remedy the situation by creating a mince pie that I like and that doesn’t upset my system. I used pastry adapted from an old recipe from Josceline Dimbleby, which has freshly squeezed orange juice as the liquid, and I added grated apple and a little Armagnac to a quality bought mincemeat. The result is that I ate FOUR of these little tarts straight off – and so far no ill-effects. If you can tolerate wheat flour just substitute plain flour for the glutenfree mix. You will get a slightly more manageable pastry, but still crisp and fragrant from the orange juice.
STOP PRESS: An hour or so after I had eaten my four delicious mincepies I started to get the heartburn that is my first symptom of having inadvertently eaten gluten. I was mystified and checked everything I had eaten all day – breakfast of black coffee and home made meatloaf on glutenfree toast, lunch of homemade vegetable soup made with fresh vegetables and organic additive free stock cube. And then the mincepies. I checked the mincemeat which I had bought from a fancy farmshop nearby, and among the ingredients it listed vegetable suet. That of course is a contradiction in terms. Suet is very precisely the beef fat from around the kidneys and loin and it has long been prized for making light suet puddings and particularly for mincemeat. Originally the suet was simply clarified and grated for use, but at the end of the nineteenth century it became a processed product and has long been sold as shredded suet – with added flour! Atora vegetable ’suet’ has about 63% fat content leaving about 37% for the flour, pectin and stabilizer, and their beef ’suet’ is 85% fat with 15% flour – at least it has less flour and fewer additives. I thought I knew what suet was so hadn’t bothered to check the details and so missed the important information that it contains gluten. Yet another thing I will have to make from first principles.
Mincepie orange pastry (gluten free)
- 250g (8ozs) gluten free white flour
- 85g (3 ozs) icing sugar
- 190g (12 ozs) butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
- finely grated zest and juice of 1/2 large orange.
Put the flour and sugar into the bowl of a food proceesor, add the butterand process briefly until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Add the orange zest and gradually add the orange juice while processing until the mixture just starts to form a dough. Remove from the bowl, pat it into a neat ball, wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before using.
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Little Almond Cakes
I’m gluten and lactose intolerant so use a gluten free flour mix and Lactofree lactose reduced milk to make these fragrant little cakes but it’s impossible to tell that they are not made with regular ingredients. They work perfectly well however with ordinary wheat flour and milk.
● 4 oz olive oil based margarine
● 4 oz golden caster sugar
● 2 large eggs
● 1 oz ground almonds
● 3 oz plain flour or gluten free flour mix
● 2 level tsps baking powder
● 2 tbsp milk (or Lactofree) , approxWhisk margarine and sugar until pale and smooth, add the eggs one at a time and whisk each in, measure ground almonds, flour and baking powder into a separate bowl or jug and stir to mix, add to the egg mixture a little at a time beating until smooth. Add the milk or Lactofree to make a mixture that is just pourable and pour into a 12 hole muffin tin (or 2x 6!),
Bake at 180℃ for 12 minutes and turn out to cool.
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Tags: baking, coeliac, gluten free, Recipes
Just a simple comparison of two shots of the same rose in our winter garden. The left hand image was shot at 1/250th at f8, while the one on the right was shot at 1/4000th at f2. I’m in no doubt which one I prefer.
And just in case it isn’t obvious to everyone – I think the background in the left hand image is very distracting and supplies no useful information while the simpler background on the right hand side leaves the flowers as the most important element of the image and so directs the viewer where I want them to look.
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Tags: photo techniques, Photography
In the past 20 years, the Mediterranean diet has been a top choice among body conscious people. But while this diet may have benefitted a lot of people, scientists have found a new and healthier diet. The Nordic diet is the latest eating plan that could surpass the benefits provided by the famous Mediterranean diet that uses olive oil, vegetables, unrefined cereals, fish, nuts and citrus fruit.
The Nordic diet features the Scandinavian rapeseed oil, elk and berries specifically cloudberries and cowberries (lingonberries). For this new diet, University of Copenhagen scientists launched a project to identify and test other products in Scandinavia that could be used in the diet plan. The research is in response to the rising number of obese people and illnesses linked to unhealthy diets in the region such as cardiovascular disease, some types of cancer and obesity.
Traditional Nordic diets are rich in protein as it makes use of fish particularly trout, cod, salmon and herring. Fish is high in omega-3 fatty acids.
A research from Norway’s University of Agder also confirmed that native berries that can be found in the northern part of Europe notably cowberries, blueberries and cloudberries contain the same omega-3 fatty acid. The berries are high in antioxidants which can help the body fight stroke, heart disease and cancer.
Additionally, rapeseed oil has the same ingredient and contains vitamin E as well. This type of oil is considered a good substitute for olive oil.Lead researcher of the new Nordic diet project, Professor Arne Astrup who’s also the president of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, added that meat from animals such as elk and reindeer and birds like the grouse, are also a healthier option compared to the livestock.
U.K. expert nutritionists look forward to this new discovery believing that the climate in Great Britain is more suitable in producing foods available in Scandinavia. The findings are good news to them since some ingredients used in the Mediterranean diet don’t grow in areas with cold climates.
I always knew I felt fitter in Sweden!
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Tags: diet, Food, healthy, Nordic, Scandinavian
Increasingly these days new clients want to see some very specific examples of work before commissioning. I suppose it’s because it is possible! My answer is to make a webpage in Lightroom and post it to my MobileMe space. It doesn’t take long to do and seems to impress.
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Tags: Adobe Lightroom, food photography
Food photography portfolio
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Tags: food photography, portfolio
is cheap enough to buy as a toy and if it turns out to be better than that it will be a bonus!It produces little 2×3″ prints that are sticky backed, the colour is not reputed to be amazing, but then the charm of the original polaroids wasn’t the accuracy of the colour!
I kept a polaroid book with a polaroid from every shot from every job stuck in and annotated, for all the years I worked on film. I have dozens of these notebooks and I love looking back at them and remembering through looking at them the circumstances of each days photography and the people involved. I know I have the images from all my digital shoots and can reproduce them in any way I like but there is something very precious about these hand crafted pages. I imagine that if I got the Polaroid PoGo printer I would recreate some sort of notebook of my present work but maybe the moment has passed with the need for it!
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Tags: Photography, polaroids, printers
Although bought from a local farm shop these strawberries were rather hard and sharp, so I cooked them with a little red wine, vanilla and sugar into some dreamy jam. I didn’t actually measure anything as I was just cooking for myself – but it’s so good that I felt I must share – here’s what I did
Strawberry Jam with Vanilla and Red Wine
I hulled and halved 3 largish punnets of strawberries and put half of them them in a pan moistened with half a glass of red wine, a couple of teaspoons of Swedish vanilla sugar, and a cup or two of jam sugar.
I let this come to the boil and roll away until the strawberries were softened before adding the rest of them. When these were soft, but still holding their shape I poured the resulting mixture into two sterilised jam jars – with a little extra to be enjoyed immediately!
The jam sugar has pectin in it so needs very little boiling to thicken, but I prefer jam to be fairly loose anyway, as I like to serve it for dessert, on pancakes or waffles or on yoghurt for breakfast. We rarely eat it on bread or toast these days. If you do like your jam seet properly boil a little longer and test by dropping a little onto a cold plate before pouring into the jars.
I find red wine a curiously sympathetic taste with strawberries – I was shown many years ago by a French friend how to add a few drops of claret to a bowl of hulled and halved strawberries which had had some sugar sprinked over them. The strawberries were left for half an hour or so and a miraculous transformation had taken place!
The juice around the strawberries tasted sweetly and intensely of strawberries – no discernable taste of wine - and the strawberries themselves were very slighlty softened so that their taste came through fresh and fragrant. Pure magic.
This jam uses that magic.
Photo notes
As ever I can’t resist shooting anything in the kitchen that looks gorgeous, and so I grabbed a camera as the strawberries came to the boil.
- Camera: Nikon D90
- Lens Nikkor 50mm 1.8 at f5.6
The camera was on a tripod and natural window light came from behind the pan in a very light room – nothing more to it than that!
This picture and more from the series are available from <a href=”http://www.thepicturekitchen.com”>thePictureKitchen</a>
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Tags: Food, food photography, hint, hints and tips, jam, photography techniques, recipe, Recipes, strawberry
Pork larb with lamb and mint
I love the way the internet has brought dishes I’d never heard of onto my table. I always try something that sounds interesting and different, especially when the dish uses something basic and simple as this dish from Laos.
I hope I found an accurate recipe to follow when I first made this but have cooked it so often now that it feels like my own. I don’t want to offend anyone who knows the original so please tell me if this is very inaccurate!
Pork Larb with Lime and Mint
● 2 little gem lettuces
● 500 gm chicken (or pork), minced
● 100 ml stock
● 2 tbsp Thai fish sauce (Nam pla)
● 1 tbsp sugar
● 5 cm piece of ginger, cut into matchsticks
● 1 mild red chilli, cut into matchsticks
● handful of mint leaves, chopped
● handful of basil leaves, chopped
● 2 tbsp fresh lime juice
● 2 spring onions, chopped
● 1 lime, for serving
Combine the meat, stock, fish sauce, sugar, ginger and chilli in a wok or frying pan and cook over a medium heat, stirring for 10 minutes until the meat is cooked and the liquid has reduced to a couple of spoonfuls. Add the mint, basil and lime juice, then stir. Sprinkle with the spring onions and serve with lime wedges and the lettuce leaves, which you can fill, wrap and eat with your fingers.
We had this for lunch today at one o’clock and this entry was written with edited pics and online before two o’clock! Isn’t the digital world wonderful!
These pictures and more from the series are available for license from thePictureKitchen
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Tags: Food, Recipes
I have a rather wonderful old cook book – World Cookery. It has nearly 600 densely packed pages with very few illustrations and the recipes do indeed come from all over the world. It has a foreword from Andre Simon but I can find no credits for the sources of any of the thousands of recipes inside. They are arranged by country and I suspect the publisher originally collected the recipes by contacting each embassy. And then, I fondly imagine, the task was deputed to the ambassadors’ wives who interviewed their local contacts or wrote down the favourite recipes of the embassy cooks. Some of these recipes are really intriguing and to me are absolutely new tastes, including this one which is in the Caribbean section but has Portuguese origins. It sounded particularly good especially as both my husband and I love vinegary tastes, and it has quickly become an absolute favourite.
The recipes as published are very minimal so I have adapted this a little and here it is:
Carne Vinho e Alhos (Fried Pickled Pork)
- 500g pork belly slices
- 1 head garlic
- bunch of herbs, parsley, chives, fennel including seed heads if available
- white wine vinegar or mixture of wine and wine vinegar
- freshly ground black pepper
Cut the pork into 1″cubes layer in a deep bowl with the chopped herbs and black pepper. Cut the head of garlic in half crossways and push in anong the pork pieces.
Pour over vinegar to cover. Put a small saucer or similar on top of the meat and weigh down if necessary to keep the meat covered by the vinegar.
Put in the fridge and leave for at least three days, although will keep for at least a week.
Drain the pork on a kitchen towel and then fry in its own fat until crisp.
Photo notes: Shooting food in failing light
We were eating the pork for supper tonight and I needed to take a photograph of it and as the days are getting shorter it was almost dark when it was ready. I used my new Nikon D90 and set the iso to 1000, fitted the 50mm lens and shot it at F3.5mm for 1/5th of a second, so it was pretty dark. I love the saturated colours produced as a result of this and it’s virtually noise free!
It is one of the most wonderful things about digital photography – the ability to create beautiful images when it is almost too dark to see your subject. It was possbible on film but as the light went the exposure meter became increasingly unreliable and the number of brackets for each shot rose. On film you couldn’t pretend very effectively that it was still day when it wasn’t – it was best to go with the flow and make it look like evening, and then your image was in the hands of the printers who would probably want to brighten it and ‘find’ detail in the darker areas. The result in the final printed magazine could be horrible – nothing like the subtle, atmospheric image you had created. Photographers learned to love the grain in fast films, and to work with it – but art directors weren’t always so keen and often wanted the impossible.
Now it seems that all things are possible. Every new crop of cameras that comes out now seems to be improving the handling of noise (the digital equivalent of film grain), and most DSLRs with their large sensors produce images at up to iso400 and often beyond where the noise is imperceptible, and even some compact cameras make a pretty good stab at it.
These pictures and several more from the series are available for license from thePictureKitchen
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Tags: food photography, low light photography, luminance noise, meat, noise, photo techniques, photo tips, Recipes, thePictureKitchen
Here’s another comparison of direct versus diffused light. This time shot outdoors on a sunny day, and also comparing the effect of four different lenses, all used on a Nikon D60. And it’s a picture of a Thai or Kaffir lime.
When I go on a location shoot for summer food I often find the client or the stylist or someone assumes I want to shoot in sunshine in order for it to look ‘fresh and summery’. In fact, the heavy shadows you get when photographing food in direct sunshine may make the image look dramatic or striking but does nothing to enhance its ‘freshness”.
The pair at top left were shot on a Nikon 105mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, the pair at top right on the Nikon 18-200MM VR
In the pic below the four shots are compared in just the diffused version and the differences are more apparent. The lenses are in the same order, Nikon 105mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor, Nikon 18-200MM VR, Nikon 50mm/F1.8 D AF Nikkor and Lensbaby Composer.
I moved the camera back and forth to make the framing as similar as possible and the shots have been cropped slightly to improve the similarity, but now that they can be seen closer it is apparent that the Nikon 105mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens has made a good job of making the lime itself very sharp and at the open aperture of f3.3 the edge if the bowl and the dish behind is nicely blurred.
The zoom lens, the Nikon 18-200MM VR, allows less control, I had the camera set to aperture priority and used the maximum aperture but on this very useful zoom lens this is only f5.6 at this extension and the whole image is pretty sharp – which is fine if that is what you want, and it certainly is a very useable image. Also the longer lens setting of 150mm has reduced the apparent width of the rim of the bowl, perhaps making the lime itself look more important, and more deeply nested in the bowl.
The third shot using the 50mm lens is again using a wide aperture, this time f3.2 but in this shorter lens the depth of field is naturally greater and thus the blur effect is slightly less pronounced. The wider lens widens the width of the rim of the bowl and makes the lime look more as if it out in the open!
The last shot on the Lensbaby Composer is probably not as technically sharp as those on the prime lenses, but the flexibility and opportunity to exercise creative choice is some compensation. I used the aperture ring that gives a nominal F5.6 aperture and swung the lens so that it maximised the focus along the length of the fruit but let it slide off to the left hand side.
There is certainly no RIGHT lens to use for a shot like this – it is simply a matter of thinking what purpose the shot is for, what you find most aesthetically pleasing and and using what you have access to. For a commissioned shot I would tend to use the 105mm, but for fun probably the Lensbaby!
Ultimately photography is more about your eye than about equipment.
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Tags: food p, food photography, lens comparison, lenses, lighting, photography technique
I love shooting food in daylight. But many people imagine that it is easier than shooting with proper photographic lighting. In fact there are as many things to get wrong when shooting in daylight as there are when controlling the light with studio lights. The decisions I make are much the same whichever way I am shooting and often the main reason to use flash is to maintain consistency through a day’s shoot in changeable weather.
This cake was about six feet from a window on a very dull morning and at first I though the daylight was sufficiently diffuse to give the effect I was looking for but as soon as I looked at it I realised that the shadows were far too pronounced for the image I had in mind. The window is quite narrow and had restricted the light in a way that could be really useful if that were what I needed!
My solution was simply to unfold a large Lastolite diffuser
This allows about half the light through, but now it is gentle and wraps itself around the cake letting me see all the detail and making it look light and soft and inviting – at least that’s what I think!
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Tags: food photography, hints and tips, lighting, photo tips, photography techniques
Carrot cake for tea
I was given a pack of Glebe Farm’s gluten free carrot cake mix which I made up today. I had to add 3 eggs and 6ozs of margarine so there were quite a few ‘real’ ingredients in it and it tastes great. Instead of making it in two sandwich tins and adding buttercream, I made it in a Swedish ring tin and left it plain, and even my non-coeliac husband thinks it’s delicious.
The packaging although nicely designed has a very indifferent photo on the front – they should have got me to do it!
Photo notes: Shot on my kitchen camera, Nikon D40X with Nikon 105Mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor Lens A
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Tags: baking, cake, food photography, glu, glutenfree, Photography, recipe
Mung beans for lunch
I have recently discovered Mung Beans and how quick and easy they are to cook compared with most beans. They are also much easier to digest and have a fresh and delicate flavour. I spent ages looking for appealing recipes for cooking Mung Beans, but what I found was mostly rather hefty and didn’t seem to really complement them.
So I cooked a batch up – they take about half an hour – and tasted them absolutely as they were and experimented. The picture above shows them cooked and while warm dressed with virgin olive oil and a little cider vinegar, salt and black pepper – much as one would make puy lentil salad and they were delicious. Andro liked them so much, he said he’d be happy to have them for lunch every day!
Photo Note: I shot this on a Nikon D40x which I keep in the kitchen (!) ready to shoot food before we eat it. This model has now been superceded and the latest equivalent is the Nikon D3000 Digital SLR Camera (18-55mm VR Lens Kit)
But the most important thing to give real style to a simple food shot is the lens you use, and although the kit lens which comes with either of these cameras is excellent and very useful for general photography, using it for food tends to produce a less than sexy image! For the first of the two photos above, I used an old favourite, Nikon 105Mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor Lens A
The second shot was taken with a Lensbaby composer
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Tags: Food, gluten, gluten free, glutenf, glutenfree, Photography, recipe, thePictureKitchen
The Canon S series used to be very popular compact cameras for serious photographers as they had plenty of manual settings. The series has returned with the S90 and it looks intriguing. It boasts an F2.0-4.9 28-105mm stabilized lens and if it has a close up capability at the longer end of that, with it’s wide max aperture it could be a useful tool for food photographers travelling light. And I’m really intrigued by the lens ring which controls some settings and sounds very intuitive and like a ‘real’ camera.
I’ll look for more info and update as I find it!
Update: I’ve looked up the focusing specs which are obviously really important for food photography, and it seems that is has what I am looking for – ie fairly close up capability at the longer lens lengths. 30 cm at the telefocus end of the lens is fine! It won’t have maximum aperture when the lens is extended but it still should have a comparatively short depth of field and as everything is controllable there’s more chance of getting what you want. It also shoots Raw for maximum control.
Focusing Range
Auto: 2.0 in./5cm-infinity (W), 12 in./30 cm-infinity (T)
Normal: 1.6 ft.-infinity/50cm-infinity
Macro: 2.0 in.-1.6 ft./5-50cm (W)
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Tags: cameras, food photography, Photography
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Tags: cameras, compact cameras, CX2 CMOS, Photography, Ricoh
The first home grown tomatoes
I find myself tending my tomato plants like babies. I check them several times a day and am anxious if I have to miss a visit to them or leave them in the care of others – even of my husband!
I have had a bad history with tomatoes – for the last few years I have lost them all to tomato blight, and despite using fresh compost and stakes etc, this year I have already suffered the shock of finding a tomato tainted with the horrid dark blistered area that signalled blight again.
Tomato blight is related to potato blight and is carried by a spore that is encouraged byn the warm humid conditions which we have suffered this year. It starts slowly but can advance with terrifying speed, affecting the leaves and then the fruit, until they are all scarred with dark deformed patches.
I looked up everything I could find to see if there was anything I could do to protect my remaining precious crop, and there was little comfort. People talked of spraying with a solution of baking soda and ‘inert oil’ or just harvesting the green tomatoes before destroying the plants.
In the end I decided to do nothing drastic and have simply been examining them minutely several times a day and snipping off any leaf that seemed remotely suspect. This has so far been ok and today I harvested the two little beauties above. One of them however has small brown marks on it which I am suspicious of. Lots more are nearly ripe and I’ll go on checking and must stock up on brown paper bags so that I can try and ripen the green tomatoes by bagging them and keeping my fingers crossed! (Putting green tomatoes into brown paper bags encourages them to ripen.)
Anyway – the two little tomatoes we had this morning were delicious – just need a few more to justify the whole process!
Pictures available from thePictureKitchen stock library
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Tags: blight, Food, food photgraphy, thePictureKitchen, tomatoes
Travelling cameras
Akrotiri, Santorini. Shot on a Panasonic Lumix LX2
A friend has just asked me for advice about which camera to buy for her holiday and I thought the advice might be useful to others.
I’ve made a list of a selection of cameras that have caught my attention recently as being good in their field and hope this helps. It depends very much what you are looking for in terms of price and size and complexity.
Wonderful Greek salad in Akrotiri, Santorini. Shot on a Fujifilm F100fd.
, for its low light capability, a Panasonic LX2 for it’s wonderful wide distortion free Leica lens, (It’s really useful to have a camera – or two – that are small enough to always have with you) AND a NikonD60 DSLR which is lighter than my other DSLRs and but still ties in with my other Nikon lenses. I keep my Nikon 18-200VR on the camera and pack a 50mm amd a Lensbaby to have fun with. And I never go anywhere without at least the F100fd in my pocket.
Caper flowers growing in Santorini. Shot on Panasonic Lumix LX2
(which has replaced my LX2) are excellent.
, or for a lighter alternative a four thirds camera from Olympus like the E-450
These are very useful and flexible and much lighter than DSLRs.
Filed under: Food, Photo equipment, Photography, Travel | Closed
Tags: Fuji F100fd, photo tips, Photography, photography tips
Tapenade on crostini
One thing I always try to have in my store cupboard is a can of pitted olives in brine. Not because I think they taste particularly wonderful on their own – I prefer my olives in a herby olive oil – but they are a wonderful ingredient to make dishes special. I use them with capers and herbs, olive oil, cherry tomatoes and a splash of white wine thrown onto cod loin in a roasting dish and roasted for 20 minutes or so in a hot oven. Instant dinner party. They are wonderful in an Italian style meat sauce or in a crisp lettusce salad with anchovies and a thick vinaigrette.
But here they are the perfect emergency food when friends appear and you want something to nibble with a glass of wine. On this occcasion I had a mixture of green and black olives, but usually I just grab a can of black pitted olives to make this easy tapenade.
Tapenade
- 1 can pitted black olives in brine, drained
- 1 tbsp capers
- half a garlic clove crushed
- olive oil as required
- sea salt to taste
Turn the olives, garlic and capers into a small food processor bowl and process for a few seconds, pour in a spoonful of olive oil and process again. Repeat until desired consistency is achieved, being careful not to overprocess and lose the texture. Taste and add salt as necessary.
Adjust this recipe to suit your taste. You can leave out the capers and or garlic or add an anchovy or two. It’s always delicious!
Photography notes:
I photographed this on my snap DSLR, a Nikon D40x which I keep in the kitchen at home. I have a small tripod there too and a few reflectors and diffusers to adapt the light to the situation. For this shot I used a large Lastolite diffuser between the window and the food to soften the shadows, and had a 105mm micro lens on the camera which gives a very short depth of field and makes the hero area of the shot – the spoonful of tapenade – very obvious.
And the picture is now available to purchase from thePictureKitchen
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Tags: Food, food photography, photo tips, photography tips, Recipes, thePictureKitchen, tips
New website page – Lifestyle
Perhaps I rearrange my website too often – I do it because I can I suppose. The software I use is so user friendly that I can add or remove or re-order in minutes and it is tempting to do it all the time! It’s called Shutterbug and I have no affiliate relationship with them – I guess I should try to set one up because I do really think that it is brilliiant!
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Tags: Photography, portfolio, publicity lifestyle, website
Bacon
I love bacon, but find it almost impossible to find anything that matches the bacon I remember from my childhood. Then we used to have thinly cut streaky bacon that would quickly go crispy in the pan and tasted wonderful.
My mother would cut off the rinds before cooking and fry them up separately for our Scottie whose daily treat they were.
This morning’s bacon was a typical disappointment. It was at least British which hopefully meant that the pigs were treated with a modicum of respect, and it was smoked which should give it a good flavour, but when I opened the packet it was, as usual, thicker than I would choose. But the real annoyance started when I put it into a dry non-stick pan and waited for the heat to start rendering out the fat to generate a mouthwatering smell. Instead it started to steam and sticky white liquid exuded from the bacon, I mopped this watery liquid up with a paper kitchen towel but still it kept coming. The picture below shows the bacon after I had drenched and removed two paper towels. The rashers had shrunk to nearly half their size and in the end were leathery rather than crispy and far too salt.
I know that there are better and more expensive bacons, but surely this borders on mis-selling. Although the packet states that it’s 88% pork I find that hard to believe considering how much liquid was exuded and how small the cooked bacon rashers were.
from Marielou’s posterous
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Tags: bacon, Food, quality, standards
Chicken of the woods
We found this on our walk with Conker yesterday afternoon and have been eating it ever since! It is Laetiporus sulphureus, Chicken of the woods and it tastes very good. You can read more about it here.
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Tags: Food, fungi, ingredients, wild
Gloria with rhubarb
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Shooting icecream
There’s a huge mythology about photographing icecream. When people ask me what I do and I admit to being a food photographer their next comment is usually something about it ‘not being real of course’! I have given up being surprised at this response and answer with what has become an almost standard spiel:
Food for photography is always real nowadays – it’s much more difficult to make models of food than to make the real thing! Where modelled food is used it’s in movies where there are issues of continuity and they use hot lights.
I remember one of the first food photographers I worked with was considered the King of Icecream photography in the 1970s (and perhaps even the 80s) and he used to use substitutes for ice cream, like mashed potato or even lard – obviously less of problem in black and white but even when working in colour he used to make the home economist construct these disgusting concoctions. I never really liked his style of photography but I was so junior then that I though I must be missing something and that if everyone thought these stiff unnatural shots were good then I should learn to love them! I’m proud to report that I never did, and when I got to choose which photographers to work with I was able to find more sympathetic people who actually liked food and wanted to show it as it was!
When I switched careers and moved to behind the camera I gradually did more and more food photography but it still took me little while to dare to tackle icecream as a subject. So much was made of how fast it would melt and how difficult it was to get any definition in it. Eventually a job came that I couldn’t avoid and confronting my fears I found they were groundless! Icecream is just another sort of food with one proviso – you need to shoot it fast!
The classic way to prepare icecream for photography is using an icecream scoop to make balls from the tub and to arrange them on a baking sheet which you put into a specially extra cold freezer to harden further. The balls can then be arranged as desired giving a little more time for the food stylist to do her work. This works well but there is a problem with frost developing on the surface and you only get a moment to work before it appears as little water crystals and then another moment as it disappears again!
The shot above was done in the way I like best – it was scooped from the tub and plonked straight into the pre-chilled cups, and put down in fromt of me. Obviously I had the right lens on the camera and had designed the shot with some empty cups first but other than that it fulfilled my favourite precept for food photography – that the chosen shot should look like your first glimpse of something delicious!
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Photography, Photography Business, thePictureKitchen | 3 Comments
Tags: advice, daylight, DSLR, Food, food photography, howto, icecream, lighting, Photography, studio, techniques
Janssons Frestelse
One of my favourite suppers, the Swedish classic dish Janssons Frestelse (Jansson’s Temptation) is a wonderful example of a few simple tastes blending perfectly together. A description doesn’t do it justice, only by tasting it does it become clear!
Somtimes it is served as one of the hot dishes on a Swedish smörgåsbord, as starter to a more substantial dinner or as a light supper dish.
The vital ingredient is Swedish ansjovis, not as you might think , a simple translation of anchovies, but in fact a marinated or pickled sprat, salty and slightly sweet at the same time. For years they were one of the things I had to bring back to England from Sweden, but now they are easily got from Ikea’’s food department!
Janssons Frestelse
● 2 large onions
● 3 large potatoes
● 2 cans of Swedish ansjovis
● 200 ml double cream + 100ml milk
● 2 tbsps breadcrumbs
● 1-2 tbsp butter
Butter an ovenproof dish.
Peel and slice the onions into thin slices (on a mandoline if you have one). Fry the onion slices gently in a frying pan with as little fat as possible for 10 minutes until golden brown, stirring occasionally to prevent browning too much.
Peel the potatoes slice thinly and cut into matchsticks. (Some mandolines can cut directly into matchsticks or a good coarse grater could be used instead).
Layer the potatoes, fried onion and pieces of anchovy into the buttered dish. The bottom and top layers should be of potato. Pour on half of the cream and milk mixture, with some of the juice from the tin, and dot the top surface with the butter. Finally scatter the breadcrumbs over the surface and bake at 225C for 30 minutes. remove from oven and add the rest of the cream mixture around the dishes edge, bake for a further 15 mins approx until the the potato feels soft and has a good colour.
Makes an excellent supper dish accomapanied by an imported lager beer and followed by a good salad, or can be served as a starter
Filed under: Food, Gluten free, Recipes, thePictureKitchen | 2 Comments
Tags: Food, glute, gluten, gluten free, glutenfree, recipe, Swedish
Buckwheat Flatbread
I had the endoscoy to test for coeliac disease last week and although I am still waiting for the official diagnosis, the weeks of enforced gluten eating before the test has convinced me that it is at the root of my problems and as soon as I got home from hospital I embarked on eating gluten free.
One of the sadnesses of my new diet is having to give up Swedish crispbread/knäckebröd and I have been searching for an alternative. Although there are lots of nice crackers and rusk type things out there to buy they are mostly too light and bland for my rustic tastes and I have been experimenting with different flours and recipes to create something that has a little ‘bite’ to it. My favourite Swedish knäckebröd was from Pyramidbageri, baked in a wood fired open oven using stoneground flours.
My version is made with the equipment I have, using the flours I can eat, but it is good and has some of the earthy peasant flavours that I love.
Buckwheat Flatbread
● 2 cups buckwheat flour
● 1 cup gluten free plain flour
● 1 tsp salt
● 1-11/2 cups water
Using either a food processor or simply a bowl with a wire whisk, pour sufficient water in a steady stream onto the flours and salt until it forms a dough – not too sticky.
Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead a little incorporating a little more flour if is too sticky. Divide the dough into 18 equal pieces and roll each one out into a circle as thinly as possible (about 8″ in diameter). You will need plenty of flour on your board and on the rolling pin to prevent it sticking. Then prick it all over with a fork or if you have one a Swedish naggare (I think that’s what it’s called - please tell me if not!)
Carefully lift the circle of dough with a broad spatula into a hot dry frying pan or griddle and cook over moderate heat, turning it over frequently until it is dry and crisp and has started to look slightly scorched in patches!
It’s particularly delicious with this excellent hard goat’s cheese from the Co-op! (Which has the added advantage of being ok for me in my current lactose intolerant state.)
Photographed using a Lensbaby lens
Filed under: At home, Food, Food photography, Gluten free, Photography, Recipes, thePictureKitchen | 4 Comments
Tags: coeliac, food photography, gluten free, glutenfree, Recipes, thePictureKitchen
Slimming
I watched a fascinating programme on the box (BBC) last night: ‘10 Things You Need To Know About Losing Weight’. A doctor testing the latest scientific theories about weight loss used these techniques to lose about 11 pounds painlessly in 3 months. And he did check the theories rigourously before he started to show that they worked!
As someone who has been battling with weight ever since my thyroid went haywire about 15 years ago this sounded worth studying!
The 10 tips are:
- Don’t skip meals – it makes you hungrier later
- Protein is more satisfying than the same number of calories in carbohydrates or fats – you feel less hungry for longer
- Blended soup satisfies you for longer than the same ingredients eaten individually.
- Calcium from dairy products causes you to excrete more fat – so eat more dairy products – especially low fat.
- The effects of exercise include 24 hours of higher rate fat burning.
- Small increases in movement throughout your normal day adds significantly to calories used.
- Using smaller plates can significantly reduce food consumption
- People tend to deceive themselves about how much they eat and 40% of our calorie consumption can be from snacking that we don’t actually acknowledge.
That’s only 8 I know – but I can’t remember the other two just now!
To me the important ones were the first six and I decided to try them for myself. It occurs to me that cottage cheese is an ingredient that fulfils some of the criteria rather well and I remember a diet I used to do years ago that I got from the Swedish magazine Femina (long before the Atkins diet!). It was high protein, low carbohydrate and low fat and included a lot of cottage cheese. I remember feeling really well on it and lost weight painlessly – but lost the copy of the magazine and had forgotten about it until now. One of the meals was cottage cheese blended with water to make a sort of soup which you had for breakfast, with fruit. I tried it this morning and it is very nice – much more protein than yoghurt and following the blended soup principle above sustained me perfectly until lunchtime with no sneaking longing for a snack.
For lunch I have had a soup that is absolutely delicious and fulfils points 2, 3, and 4 above – and it’s glutenfree!
Slimming Cabbage Soup
● 1/2 white cabbage, finely shredded
● 1 leek, finely shredded
● 3 stalks celery, chopped
● 1 handful parsley, chopped
● 1 handful lovage, chopped – if you can find it!
● dash white wine, if available
● 2 lamb stock cubes, or 1 litre home made stock if you have it
● 1 litre water
● 150 gms cottage cheese or quark
Combine the vegetables and herbs in a saucepan, add the wine if using and heat to steam through the vegetables – don’t burn! Add the water and stock cubes, or homemade stock, bring to the boil and simmer until the vegetables are soft – about 20 minutes.
Blend the soup using a stick or goblet blender, adding the cottage cheese. Blend until fairly smooth – but leave a little texture!
I wanted to photography my lunch before I ate it but didn’t want to spend too long doing it so grabbed my Panasonic Lumix LX2 which was closest to hand, mounted it on a tripod so I could use it at 100iso, and set it on macro. I then shot it from above so that the background didn’t run out of the frame and so that it had a graphic quality as a shot that didn’t depend on a short depth of field for effect.
And I have drunk my soup while I have been writing this – and feel satisifed and energised!
Now to fulfil point 5 in the list and take Conker for a walk – he gets his dinner after the walk so is pestering me to go NOW!
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Gluten free, Photography, Recipes | 2 Comments
Tags: compact camera, diet, Food, gluten free, glutenfree, Photography, slimming, soup, tips
Still waiting to have the endoscopy that will confirm (or not?) that I am coeliac but in the meantime I am meant to eat gluten so they don’t get a false negative. This is getting increasingly difficult as I seem to be getting ever more sensitive to it. I find that I can only manage two or three days with a single piece of regular bread or Swedish rye crispbread for breakfast before I feel so awful that I give in and give my gut a rest for a few days. Eating gluten feels like taking poison. On Saturday I started a few days off gluten and expected to feel a little better by Monday or Tuesday. I was therefore really upset when I went on feeling bad and haven’t started feeling less sore yet, on Wednesday evening.
I’ve just been doing a little sorting out in the kitchen and found I had two packets of baking powder – one clearly marked gluten free, but when I examined the other pack found it contained wheat. I had never considered baking powder as a source of wheat but realised that I had used half a teaspoon of it on Sunday morning when I made buckwheat pancake as part of my breakfast. Mystery solved, although I am rather shocked to realise that such a tiny bit of gluten should have such an extreme effect. I suppose it is all part of my new education and has the bonus effect of keeping my reaction obvious for the endoscopy!
The pancake tasted good however and I’ll make it again – but with wheatfree baking powder!
Buckwheat pancake wrap
- 1 cup buckwheat flour
- half tsp glutenfree baking powder
- 1 cup water
- 1 tblsp olive oil
- half tsp salt
Mix all ingredients together in the order given and stir until batter is smooth. The mixture should be more or less the consistency of single cream.
Heat a non-stick frying pan and add a few drops of olive or sunflower oil, and wope round with a paper kitchen towek. Ladle enough batter into the hot pan to swirl around covering the surface, and cook over a fairly high heat until the top surface appears dry, and then turn and cook on the other side.
I had some Black Forest ham which I folded in to the pancakes which made a delicious combination!
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Gluten free, Recipes, Shopping | Leave a Comment
Tags: baking powder, gluten free, glutenfree, pancake, recipe, wheat
Rum cocktails
Had a really nice job last week with lovely people – and delicious rum! I’ve rarely drunk rum since the days when Bacardi and coke seemed the most sophisticated drink in the world, preferring a very dry vodka martini or a scotch and soda if I felt like drinking spirits, but having recognised my gluten intolerance I realise that all the grain spirits are now off my list, and rum has a new appeal.
The rums I was photographing were from mostly small producers in the West Indies and Kester our great mixologist made them up into a wonderful selection of cocktails.
Photographing drinks is a specialist branch of food photography which is often done with much complicated fakery, but I find, as with photographing food the best results are achieved by shooting as simply as possible, using real ice and natural looking lighting. We had to produce a series of shots to use together so I had to use flash for consistency, and a few reflectors and pieces of black card ensured the highlights were nice, but essentially all was real. No perspex ice, no glycerine condensation, no dulling spray or dry ice.
These drinks were all stunning but the rum itself drunk straight or on the rocks was a revelation. It was deep and subtle and delicate – I’m only sorry there were only a few drops of this deliciousness left at the end of the shoot to take home and share with Andro.
Filed under: Drink, Food, Food photography, Gluten free, Photo equipment, Photography | 4 Comments
Tags: cocktails, drink, glutenfree, lighting, rum, spirits
Painted pork
Found a piece of demo software on my Mac that I had forgotten all about – StudioArtist. It’s quite complicated with hundreds of options, but I quickly produced this using the ‘dry oils’ brush and think it’s really effective, despite not really liking the idea of cheating a painting!
Think I will do some more experimenting and may even buy the software ($379) so I can save my masterpices at full size.
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Mac, Photography, Software | Leave a Comment
Tags: food photography, Mac, Software, techniques
Beetroot grabbed and bought!
Here’s another example of a picture taken with my pocket camera – my Fuji F100fd which is good enough to go into thePictureKitchen
library. This time the shot was taken in good light so I could easily handhold the camera at 200iso, and the detail and freedom from noise is exemplary. It’s very hard to distinguish it from an image taken with a DSLR.
To maximise the quality I set the camera exposure to -1/3 so I wasn’t in danger of losing detail in the highlights, and I was careful to compose the shot so that it was square to the edge of the basket which just shows at the bottom, and that the curve of the main set of leaves was left intact – and then I took several frames at slightly different crops to be sure.
And then I noticed the shopkeeper watching me and was embarrassed into buying a bunch of beetroots and some fine onions (out of shot). Fortunately the beetroot were as good as they looked. I baked them in the oven in their skins until they were just tender and served them Swedish style just with unsalted butter as a starter. The leaves I washed, trimmed, steamed and served as a vegetable with the main course – delicious (and thrifty!)
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Photo equipment, Photography, Recipes, Shopping, thePictureKitchen | 1 Comment
Tags: camera tips, compact camera, Food, food photography, Fuji F100fd, photo tips, photography tips, Recipes, stock, stock photography, thePictureKitchen, tips
Irritatingly I find I am either gluten or wheat intolerant – it’s being investigated now. I have always prided myself in my omniverousness and general lack of faddiness in my eating. Of course I’m nearly always watching my weight and have at various times done the Atkins diet or variations thereof, and have always felt particularly well when doing it, but have drifted back to carbohydrates (and therefore wheat etc) because of social pressures.
What has caused me to examine my diet more closely is that I have been getting increasingly tingly and numb toes! This is much more uncomfortable and alarming than it sounds – and wakes me with the discomfort in the small hours (hence much Tweeting at strange times). Various blood tests have shown that I am short of Vitamin B12 and Folic acid, and Vitamin B12 deficiency has now been directly connected to neuropathy (nerve damage in the extremities), and can be caused by malabsorption of nutrients from the gut which in turn can be caused by coeliac disease which is the more severe form of gluten intolerance. Since I have known this I have been testing my reaction to wheat, barley, rye and oats which are the culprits and have discovered a clear relationship to their intake and the reaction of my gut.
I am off to see a gastroenterologist at the end of the month to explore this properly but have such mixed feelings about it. It would be fantastic to halt (0r even repair??) the damage to my feet and to stop my gastric system from getting ever more volatile, but the thought of having to be serious about the exclusion of all gluten products from my diet (and that means ALL) is really daunting and rather depressing.
The other driving force in my quest for a proper diagnosis is that my mother for about 25 years has been complaining about increasing numbness in her feet which has now at over 80 reached her knees and has also had a digestive system that sometimes leaves her trapped at home not daring to travel. An investigation on her gut about 15 years ago resulted in a removal of a portion of it where 2 little polyps were found since when her digestion has been much worse. I, of course, now think that she has been coeliac – or at least gluten intolerant – all this time and am anxious for her to be diagnosed to improve her quality of life which is now rather impaired.
Anyway… in the meantime I have been exploring what the implications of it would be and researching what I can eat!
One of the things I thought I would miss was pancakes – but I think they will be the least of my problems having found that I love buckwheat and that it makes superb pancakes. Another good alternative is corn and I love these Mexican Corn Pancakes – and even if your gut is in perfect working order they are quite delectable so I give the recipe below. Enjoy!
Mexican Corn Pancakes
● 1 1/2 cups fine corn flour● 1 cup milk
● 1 egg
● 1/2 tsp. salt
● 1 small can sweetcorn, mash half the corn slightly before mixing in
● 20 gms butter, melted
Optional additions:
● green chilies or jalapenos
● coriander (cilantro) leaves, chopped
● ground cumin
● chicken or vegetarian stock instead of milk
● cheese, grated
● red or green sweet pepper, diced
Mix all of the ingredients in a large bowl and allow to sit for 10 minutes. Heat the griddle or a large skillet over medium heat. Grease the skillet with a little ghee or butter and drop the cakes onto the griddle, slow-cooking them 6-8 minutes each side, until browned and crispy.
While the first batch of cakes are cooking, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and have ready a medium sheet pan. Remove the cakes to the sheet pan and bake for a minutes, until cooked all the way through.
Filed under: Food, Photography, thePictureKitchen | 1 Comment
Tags: Food, glutenfree, Recipes, thePictureKitchen
Easter Kedgeree
Kedgeree seemed like a good dish for Easter combining as it does both Good Friday fish and eggs. And the bonus is the pretty yellow and green which are the Easter colours. We had it both for supper on Good Friday and (leftover) for lunch yesterday.
It looked so good that I had to snap it but as I was hungry there was no time to get a DSLR out and so I grabbed a couple of shots with my FujiFilm Fuji FinePix F100fd
Buttery Kedgeree
A dish with history – it probably originated in India as ‘Khichdi’ but was adopted by the Scots and found in a Scottish cookery book in 1790. FIsh was a popular breakfast dish during the Raj in India (when morning caught fish was still fresh).
It returned to Britain with British Colonials and became popular in Victorian Britain as part of the fashionable Anglo Indian cuisine.
● 1½ lb (700 g) thick smoked haddock fillets, preferably undyed
● 1 bay leaf
● 4 oz (110 g) butter
● 1 onion, chopped finely
● 2 tsps level teaspoon medium curry powder
● 1 tsp turmeric
● long-grain white rice measured up to the 8 fl oz (225 ml) level in a measuring jug
● 3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
● 1 handful curly parsley, freshly chopped
● 1 tbsp lemon juice
● salt and freshly ground black pepper
Poach the haddock fillets in a wide shallow pan with the bayleaf and enough cold water to cover. Bring just to the boil, turn the heat down and cover and simmer gently for about 8 minutes or until just cooked. Drain off the cooking liquid and save. Put the fish into a dish and keep warm covered with foil.
In the same pan, melt 2 oz (50 g) of the butter and soften the onion in it for 5 minutes. Stir in the curry powder and turmeric and cook for a moment or two to develop the spice flavours, then stir in the measured rice and add 16 fl oz (450 ml) of the haddock cooking water. Stir once then, when it comes up to simmering point, cover with a tight-fitting lid and cook, very gently, for 10-15 minutes or until the rice grains are tender.
When the rice has been cooking for 10 minutes, remove and discard the skins from the fish and flake the flesh. When the rice is ready, remove it from the heat and fork in the flaked fish, hard-boiled eggs, parsley, lemon juice and the remaining butter. Season to taste and serve.
Delicious with buttered spinach.
Filed under: At home, Food, Food photography, Lightroom, Photo equipment, Photography, Recipes, thePictureKitchen | 1 Comment
Tags: compact camera, Food, Fuji, Fuji F100fd, recipe, Recipes, thePictureKitchen
Bought, photographed, filed,
Having been scanning loads of images it was lovely this morning to enjoy the speed of digital. I bought a bag of this wonderful fresh purple sprouting broccolli in a new little shop in Edenbridge, Ryan’s Table, brought it home, photographed it on the kitchen counter by todays soft light and it is already in thePictureKitchen for sale as stock.
And we shall eat it for supper tonight!
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Kent, Photography, Photography Business, Shopping, thePictureKitchen | Leave a Comment
Tags: Food, ingredients, thePictureKitchen, vegetables
I have a huge back catalogue of images shot on film that fill my study at home. Four metal filing cabinets are full and so boxes and boxes of transparencies are piled up around the room as well. Every now and again I have a blitz on them to add to thePictureKitchen and for the last few days I have had my old iMac (on a stalk) working constantly with my Canoscan 4000US scanner. Every time I go past the computer I load another strip of four trannies and press scan.
Scanning
I use Vuescan software from Ed Hamrick and have updated the version I use regularly over the years as it has got better and better. It is now totally brilliant and produces excellent scans from a variety of film stock and best of all the dust and scratch cleaning now works almost perfectly avoiding those tedious hours I used to spend spotting and repairing in Photoshop. I now process the results in Lightroom and the few odd remaining blemishes can easily be handled by the heal tool. The colour Vuescan produces is so accurate that I don’t find any advantage in outputting the scans as raw files, and in fact output jpegs at 100%. As Lightroom makes no changes to its original files this works well and saves space and time.
Using ‘Clarity’ in Lightroom
The other really effective trick on scanned images in Lightroom is to selectively increase ‘clarity’. This works particularly well on food pics where there is generally an area that can benefit from having the detail enhanced but it helps in emphasizing the ‘hero’ area in any pic. Using the brush tool select your area, turn the automask option off and click ‘O’ to highlight the area you have selected. Click ‘O’ again so you can see what you are doing then slide the clarity setting until you are happy.
Shooting Gordon Ramsay!
I used the clarity trick on this pic of salmon being got ready for steaming by Gordon Ramsay. He was rushing around his kitchen and I was working under pressure to catch each important moment. The client (in about 2002) still wasn’t accepting digital files and it is one of the last jobs I shot on film. I had to handhold the camera as there wasn’t room for a tripod or lights while Gordon and his team, plus client editor and art director, my assistant and I jostled for space around his huge cooking station.
It was necessary to shoot wide open to avoid shake (no vibration reduction then) and I used prime lenses on my Nikon F90x
The result is that the stream of olive oil is pin sharp as is the back area of the salmon, but looking at it now, with more experience of all the additional control that digital and new cameras give, I wish the depth of focus on the salmon was a little greater. Using Lightroom with clarity has appeared to put some information back in!
Filed under: Food photography, Lightroom, Mac, Photo equipment, Photography, Restaurants, Software | 1 Comment
Tags: 35mm, Cooking, film, fish, Food, Gordon Ramsay, Lightroom, photo tips, Photography, scanning, thePictureKitchen, work
This was breakfast this morning! There was just a little chilli left over from dinner last night and hardly worth keeping, but inspiration struck and I popped it into a pan, made a dip in the middle of it and broke a free-range egg into it. It looked so nice I grabbed the nearest camera to hand, the Fuji F100fd. Taking food pics with a compact camera is a rather uncertain business – you can’t count on a perfect result – and this isn’t perfect, but I think it is good enough to share the pleasure I had in the cooking.
Tips for getting the best out of a compact camera for shooting food.
- Turn the flash off: Using on-camera flash almost never improves a food shot. On a sophisticated camera with adjustable flash a tiny blip can occasionally produce a useful bit of fill but that’s for experts. In nearly every circumstance you will get a better result using daylight or well diffused room lights.
- Zoom in: Wide angle lenses rarely flatter food. Most compact cameras bias their macro mode to wide angle and many people think this is therefore how to get close to food in their photos. Much better however is to frame the shot from a distance, using a ‘long lens’ setting. This has the effect of tightening the composition and preventing verticals being distorted.
- Shoot against the light: Obviously not directly into sunlight, but usually food looks best when it the light is coming from sufficiently far behind to reflect on shiny surfaces. This creates highlights and leaves darker shadows which emphasise texture.
- Compose carefully: Make sure your picture has a focal point, a ‘hero’ area which the eye is drawn to and which is sharp and correctly exposed. Also check around the edges of the composition to make sure you have only those things in the shot that you intend.
- Check the white balance: Some cameras are better than others at measuring light temperature. Experiment with the settings on your camera to get the most neutral result and if necessary correct afterwards. Programmes like iPhoto on the Mac or Picasa on a PC have easy ways of doing this.
I plan further pieces about these various tips individually – so check back later!
Another compact camera snap – my mother’s delicious lunch at the Woodcock, Iden Green near Benenden, Kent. I was rather envious, my guinea fowl with wild mushrooms in a brandy sauce was excellent but I lusted after the scallops! Unfortunately the focus is not quite right on this – one of the hazards of using a compact camera! It should have been spot on on that hero scallop in the centre!
Filed under: Food, Food photography, Photo equipment, Photography, Restaurants, thePictureKitchen | 6 Comments
Tags: camera tips, compact camera, Food, food photography, Fuji F100fd, low-light, photo tips, Photography, restaurant, tips
The Spydercube, announced on March 2, sounds like a really useful device for food photographers – especially those often working in daylight or on location as I do. It’s used to set white balance and for measuring the density of highlights and shadows in a scene.
From their site:
“This is not just another gray card! Create your own custom white balance, obtain spectral neutrality data from multiple lightsources, and correct highlight and shadow details with SpyderCube. Establishing an accurate custom white balance ensures an accurate image from the start of each new photo session. Photographers can capture accurate color without a lot of after-the-fact manipulation. SpyderCube is the RAW calibration tool that belongs in every photographer’s bag!
The SpyderCube makes your camera more intelligent! It captures in a single shot a wide range of color and exposure data. You simply use the cube in one of a series of images, adjust accordingly, save as a preset, and apply to an entire series of images to color correct in seconds.”
Sounds very useful and not too expensive at $59.00
Filed under: Photo equipment, Photography, Photography Business | 3 Comments
Tags: equipment, food photography, Photography, stock photography, studio
Sudden streams springing
Walking in the fields with Conker this afternoon there was the sound of rushing water everywhere. So much rain has fallen recently that every little ditch is full and punctuated with waterfalls.
When walking I prefer to carry a small camera – my current snap cameras are a Fuji F100FD and a Panasonic DMC-LX2 which I love for its great lens and panoramic shape but only in good light. Today it was grey and I grabbed the Fuji and used it as well to capture the sound of the little waterfalls. In todays dreary light the pix from the F100fd came out looking a little dull but I ran them through Lightroom (which works very well on jpegs despite being designed for raw files) and they cracked into life. I punched in the blacks and boosted the contrast and clarity a little and added a subtle vignette and suddenly they look as I remembered!
Filed under: Kent, Lightroom, Mac, Software | Leave a Comment
Tags: compact camera, country, F100fd, Kent, landscape, Lightroom, photo tips, tips, Weald, wealden, wet, winter
I don’t think I am alone as a photographer in finding the compilation of a new portfolio a daunting task! There are so many things about it that paralyse me.
I am always striving for perfection (in my terms) and then agonising that my idea of perfection will be so different to the viewers as to be unintelligible to them. I know that I love the apparent casualness of that slight melting of icecream that makes it look as if it won’t hurt your teeth – but will the art director think that I can’t photograph ‘perfect’ icecream with finely etched texture where it’s been scooped out? I love the look of melted cheese where it is just starting to drip down the face of the sandwich – a moment later is too late – will they spot that I caught that ‘decisive moment’? I think that the darkened areas on the supermarket quiche give it the homebaked look they are trying to sell but . . .
Picture available from thePictureKitchen
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Tags: Food, food photography, Photography, portfolio, quiche
Hot smoked salmon
Part of the ongoing project for Andrew & Sigrid Appleby in Orkney. Andrew is a potter with who sells excellent ceramics but the other string to his bow is the smoking of Orkney produce to produce some really special products. This is a warmed piece of his hot smoked organic Orkney salmon with a couscous mixed with slow cooked red peppers onion and garlic, and dressed with olive oil, lemon juice and lots of chopped parsley.
Photographed in my kitchen with a large circular diffuser minimising the shadows, and then processed in Lightroom 2 to make sure there is plenty of detail in the salmon flesh and couscous using the selective brush in clarity mode.
I am also designing them a new website so will keep you posted and give a link when it’s updated.
Picture available from thePictureKitchen
Filed under: Food, Orkney, Photography, Recipes, thePictureKitchen | Leave a Comment
Tags: couscous, fish, food photography, Lightroom, Photography, Recipes, salmon
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- Pickled pork – Carne Vinho e Alhos in evening light
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