When Stephen Segal approached me to put the Nikon Z6 mirrorless through its paces, I thought that the various requirements of the day to day creation of media for a hotel, spa, bar and restaurant would be the ideal testing ground.
Everything needs to happen fast, from production to publication. All the deadlines are “last week, Tuesday” and its a myriad of scenarios with various lighting conditions.
So… this is how we do it.
How do you make somebody “Taste” your image?
Remember the girl with the Ribs and Wings? We are back on the same question: How do you get somebody to order a new dish for the very first time? How do you convince them to let go of what they know and adventurously try something new?
Previously we used expression and body language with bright colours to entice patrons to order a “Pub-Dining” style dish. Now the job is to sell a brand new Fine Dining Menu to Patrons of Zagora.
Key points:
The nice thing about fine dining dishes is that the chefs do a lot of effort to do good plating. The presentation is just as much part of the dish as the taste, so making the dish look good is halfway won!
People buy with their eyes. Fine Dining more so. These are generally higher-cost items because of the ingredients and time it takes to create. You need to entice clients both visually and with complexity of the combinations.
The last things is that unlike fast food or pub food, patrons expect to receive a dish as they saw it in an image or video.
Solution: Shoot fast and straight from the hot or cold pass.
Setup:
You have to work fast!
No way around it… meat dries out, potatoes loses their shine, and icecream melts, while salads wilt. Typically you have 15 minutes before a dish starts to look “flat”
I like to shoot food with Natural light, against a window or 45-degrees from behind. Maybe sidelight. I love the texture that pops up when the light DOESN’T come from the front!
It doesn’t mean you need to shoot contrasty, Flat light has its place, and sometimes that is all you have, or sometimes the food has just too much of its own texture to work with a sidelight or backlight. Just walk around the food and see where it looks best… rotating the plate with the “hero” side always facing you.
But the setup and styling is simple in this case… (I find simple is often the easiest way to go…) I shoot it where the guests will eat it, straight from the kitchen as the chefs prepared it.
The biggest technological influence, my starting point is an incidence lightmeter reading, and my colour chart (I want the colours to pop, but naturally, and true.) and I want as much colour depth and latitude so I shoot from a tripod at slow shutterspeeds
Camera setting was simple. Nikon Z6 set to ISO100 f/9 or f/10 (except the occasional really shallow DOF shot at f/4) on the 24-70 f/4 – This forces me to slow down and actually look at the shot, (angle, corners and Background) and focus point.
Pro Tip: Small reflectors is your friend. In this case, I literally folded an A4 page to stand upright and give me a light shadow fill.
Availaible light = Any light that is available!
Take-away:
Although this was shot fast, we will be spending a lot of time cleaning these guys up and making sure colours are accurate and representative of the actual dish. This is the time consuming part. We shot 3x half days on 24 dishes and desserts, but the final images will probably each get about 2 hours of dodge-&- burn treatment before they are ready to go out (The images on this page is fresh from RAW conversion in C1Pro)
I love shooting like this where you are literally not allowed to use all the food styling tips and tricks to make food look good. Pretty much just a glorified Food Blogger!
