The Tanager Blog

For the last year, I’ve been trying to fine tune my food photography skills. This — I’m sure — is from flipping through too many Food + Wine and Travel + Leisure magazines. Nonetheless, food photography ain’t easy. It’s more than just putting the camera on a narrow depth of field, pointing, and shooting. For one, some foods look just plain awful. I’m thinking of scrambled eggs and pretty much any of this crap. Secondly, food has to be shot fresh out-of-the-oven/off-the-skillet/out-of-the-pot/off-the-grill. After about four or five minutes it starts to lose its shape, its color gets dull, and all the nasty bits (i.e. grease) ooze out the bottom. You probably haven’t noticed this. I hadn’t. It took a pro to tell me what a pain food photography can be, and this hurry-up-and-shoot part is chief among them.

I won’t show the pork tenderloin experiment from Saturday night. Let’s just say we know how to follow a recipe and execute it, but plating it is another matter. Pig products should never look like a smiley face, and a sprig of rosemary shouldn’t look like a tuft of hair. It was bad.

But I was happy with Sunday’s experiments. Hailey (the resident baker) made Bara Brith, a delicious tea bread from Wales. I’m not sure of all that went into it, but it required soaking tea bags in water with brown sugar and a medley of dried fruit before folding that into the dough. It’s easily the best sweet breakfast bread she’s ever made.

The top photo was taken with the ring flash off camera (to the right) on a manual setting (1/125, f/20, 100 ISO). The bottom one, with available cloudy light pouring in the window. As much as I want the ring flash to make me a better food photographer, I like the natural light shot more.

For dinner, we made what has become a new favorite — chicken sofrito. It’s a Spanish chicken and rice dish in which you brown chicken thighs and legs, add zesty goods (onions, garlic, peppers, fennel seed, spices), a cup of rice, chicken broth and then you bake it for 25 minutes and finish it off with a quick broil to crisp the chicken. We got the recipe out of a recent Food + Wine Magazine and we’ve cooked it three times in four weeks. Needless to say, I think fennel seed should be a secret ingredient on the Iron Chef. I love that stuff.

Both of the above sofrito shots were taken with the ring flash off camera, and here it worked pretty well. The chicken is actually backlit on a wooden table in the top shot…that explains the yin-ying black and white effect on top and bottom.

We’ll be trying a few more experiments in the coming weeks. Its a good time of year to be dinking around with the flash. More to come soon.