Second Chances

Writing a food blog can be a time consuming task. Besides the actual visit to the restaurant where I will spend anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours experiencing and photographing my meal, I will then spend roughly another hour processing the photographs so that they are blog-worthy and then another hour writing up the copy to tell the story of my visit. Often times, I will split the task of processing my photographs and writing the copy for separate days.

If I have had a particularly busy week, the numbers of days between the two tasks can grow uncomfortably large. After about a week or two, specific details become fuzzy and I start to lose the ability to describe my meal with the accuracy it deserves other than to say, "It was good." or "I enjoyed the salad dressing." If too much time goes by, I am willing to simply discard the blog post and pictures that I had started and re-visit the restaurant for another experience.

This is exactly what happened to a local Chinese/Japanese/Thai restaurant in the Fairlawn, Ohio area. Because the initial experience was so positive, I decided to return for a second visit and re-try a number of the dishes I had eaten during my first visit. Fortunately, I still had my uploaded photographs from my first visit that I could compare with the new round. I realized that the original photographs were some of the last I had taken with my previous camera, the HTC Incredible.

Here is the original shot of the green tea pot and cup, modified heavily in Picasa to be usable:


Because of the darkness in the restaurant, I had jacked up the ISO to about 1250, the maximum my phone would allow. The noise in the photograph is obvious. To say that the cup of green tea in this photograph makes me want one for my very own would be stretching it.

Compare it to today's photograph of the same thing:


Taken using a tabletop tripod, THIS is a cup of tea that appeals to me. No flash with a light source from the tungsten bulb overhead, I used an ISO of 400, f/2.8 for my aperture, and 1/10 of a second for the shutter speed. I also did a custom white balance off of my white paper napkin. Other than cropping and resizing the image, nothing else has been done to it. I love how the aperture allowed for a lovely narrow DOF (depth of field).

For my main entrée today, I re-ordered the shredded pork and pickle noodle soup. Here was the original photo from my first visit:


I broke the cardinal rule of thumb for filming food in an actual restaurant: I used the flash in order to attempt to get a better photo. Fortunately, no one was near me, so no one was inconvenienced by the flash of light. But, while I managed to capture some of the solid items in the bowl, unfortunately, the tiny globules of fat floating on the soup's surface turned into a thousand tiny mirrors, directly reflecting the light back to the sensor. Looking at that photograph, it would appear that the broth is light and clear. Not so.

Here is the photograph I took today:


Wow! What a difference. In addition to lowering the angle at which I took the picture, it is clear that the soup is actually a rich, dark brown color. I used exactly the same camera settings as the green tea photograph above: tabletop tripod, no flash, ISO 400, f/2.8, 1/10 of a second for shutter speed. Whereas the first photo makes me not want to even taste the soup, the second one (at least I feel it does) engages me and makes me want to lift soup spoon and chopsticks.

The G12 is a pretty darn amazing camera and I'm starting to understand what my beginning photography instructor has been telling us during our time together: Visualize the shot you want to take and then use the camera to make it happen. I realize not every photograph will be a winner, but as you can see from just two of the photos I took at lunch today, apparently I've already internalized some of this concept.

Feedback is always welcome.