A hero olive cheeseball and friends

The cheeseballs really are rolling - all 6 variations that I uploaded were accepted by the inspectors. Which would you choose to go beside the recipe in a magazine? Feel free to choose or critique in a comment on the post. The answer will be on my Blog as soon after the 16th December as the buyer chooses. You can check out the competition here


Note that the bottom two have my hero olive cheeseball, neatly cut in two to show the olive and pepper stuffing. I didn't realise when I was shooting but unfortunately the two halves look like mad glass eyes on a lumpy brown monster so some of my images would be great for Hallowe'en or a children's party but not for a serious magazine. If I'd had more time or energy, I'd have exaggerated the effect and shot some crazy ones too. Instead I have some that are just bad.

The close-up I posted last time was accepted too so that's number 6

1.

2.

3. Eye level with hero olive cheeseball

4. tall person view with hero olive cheeseball

5.

The deadline for the shoot isn't until 16th December so there is bound to be some competition by then. There's a lot of cameraderie amongst the food shooters who meet up in the Forums to respond to recipe requests so I usually play nice and post images early if I've had them accepted. This can backfire, like the time I posted before inspection and had straight rejections. Ouch! And obviously you're showing your hand so any little genius idea you've added might spark a better idea to trump yours.

I did shoot the pork stew too, for the same buyer, so I'll post those but I won't share the olive balls until nearer the deadline. I'm hoping no-one else will pick up on the New Year party favours idea so why make it easy for them? Of course if the competition read my blog, they're well ahead, and they can always check out my portfolio (Sort by Age to see the most recent). The truth is, the other food shooters are all so good they don't need my help but a little paranoia is good for business. Sometimes, the first images posted are just so good that everyone else wonders why they should bother but it's always interesting to compare takes on the same recipe.

There are 30,000 photographers selling over 8 million photos on istockphoto.com
so competition isn't just fierce, it's life-threatening for those who make stock their livelihood. I'm glad I'm not one of them.

Olive balls ready to roll

Basic olive balls, straight from the oven and straight from camera

The olive balls are cooked, they look good to me and actually they taste good (that's one less for the shoot). Great party food. I have all the props ready to play with, minus the extra stuffed olives, which I was going to use as background ingredients but I forgot and ate them.

Technical detail
The buyer likes a vertical and a horizontal version of the shot, doesn't usually like close-ups such as my image above, but prefers the angle that you'd get if you were a tall person looking at your dinner plate. As I'm not a tall person, I am imagining this. However, another food shooter I admire, and a competitor on the Recipe Requests, jonathansloane, took a great bird's eye shot for October requests and that was the squash casserole shot chosen, so what's usual isn't always what's best, and rules are there to be broken.

However, I've made mistakes in the past that I try to avoid:-

1) Too shallow a depth of field, especially when it gives alien blobs in the foreground or the cut edge of e.g. cheese or cake with only a tiny area in focus. As I often shoot hand-held, this is one of my big faults in order to get a fast shutter-speed and consequent sharpness. For the 'on the plate in front of you, tall person' angle, I usually start at f5.6 these days and when I find a composition I really like, I use the tripod for a few last shots.

2) Trailing off into dark background. Food likes backlighting and istock shots don't get rejected by the Inspectors for being high-key. I need to keep backgrounds bright - or have a reason for not doing so.

3) Dog hairs. You don't have a dog? Believe me, even if you don't have a dog, even if you've cleaned the life out of every item in your kitchen, some imperfection will be visible on your precious food when you view it at 200%. I've spent hours Photo-shopping brown dimples out of aubergines and tomatoes, wrinkled leaves on lettuce, or burnt corners on meat in casseroles. The truth is that real food rarely looks perfect and raw food straight form the garden that tastes wonderful usually looks a lot worse than out-of-season, supermarket produce that might as well be water for all the taste it has. For a food shot, only visually perfect is good enough.

Lens
Lenses are very personal choices. I shoot Nikon and my favourite for food shots is my 60mm f2.8 macro. It's a sharp, fast prime and there's no such thing as too close. Okay, it can be a bit temperamental on focus, and my eyesight isn't good enough for manual focus, but we've been buddies for three years now and we know each other. this was my first slr lens - crazy choice! Very me.

Sometimes I use my 70mm-200mm f2.8 as was suggested to me ages ago by yet another food shooter whose work I love, and who's also a qualified Chef with a restaurant in Ireland, foodandwinephotography A long lens gives lovely depth of field but there's the extra weight to consider = tripod

Image quality
I shoot RAW with basic jpeg so I can see results straight away but have the raw material to process in Photoshop, rather than in-camera additions.

After the shoot
I've taken 110 shots and I'm happy with them. I now need to choose about 6 to process and upload, to ensure I get one vertical, one horizontal to offer the buyer. My images will have to go through the istock inspection process and no-one can guarantee acceptance. The process will take a week or so before my images are up for sale and when they are, IF any of them get through inspection, I'll post a new blog so you can choose the one you like the best of mine, and see whether you prefer mine to the other takes on the recipe offered to the buyer. If you're one of my competitors, good luck, and may the photographer with the prettiest balls win.

Never trust the recipe

Measuring a cup of flour in a bra

You spotted the deliberate mistake in the recipe, right? Take another look.

Olive Balls
Serves 8–10 as appetizer


1 cup cheddar cheese, grated
¼ cup butter, softened
¼ teaspoon paprika
dash Tabasco or other hot sauce
¾ cup all-purpose flour
36–40 tiny pimento stuffed olives


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl, mix together cheese, butter, paprika and hot sauce. Blend in flour. Shape dough into 1½-inch circles. Place olives in center and fold dough around olives to form balls. Refrigerate 10 minutes. Bake on lipped baking sheet for 20 minutes. Serve warm.

So, you spotted the deliberate mistake? No, me neither, at least not till I was happily whizzing cheese, butter and breadcrumbs, and recognized what my subconscious had told me from the start -  these ingredients make a crumb topping not a dough. So, the choice is whether to roll the olives in crumbs (nice idea - note to self, try it another time) or, as the rest of the recipe clearly requires, turn crumbs to dough.

I'm trying to keep to the recipe, as it's for a magazine, so I've added water, squidged the dough (which I consider to be pastry rather than dough but what would I know), and put it to chill.

American cup measures

Mistakes in recipes happen, especially at the pre-publication stage, when you can get typos, printing mistakes or - worst of all - recipes that just don't work.

International differences in measurements drive me crazy and ** Americans look away now and don't read this ** I hate the stupid idea of cup measurements. The attempt to rationalise an inexact measurement based on 19th century crockery, by standardising it in relation to real mathematical units, is like saying a donkey is equivalent to 120kg and then measuring in donkeys. Take a quarter cup of butter; I have actual cup measurements (as opposed to the ones in the top photo) so my cups are in fact standardised, but how much butter I fit into a quarter cup depends on how much I squidge it. If I squidge it lots, I can fit in twice as much. And don't start me on the difference between volume and weight.

You can also get outcomes that taste horrible but as taste is so personal, I just assume that someone will like it, and my job is to make it look appetising. I love to imagine all these people at home looking at my photo and saying, 'Oh my, that looks good! I'm surely going to make that!' And then I imagine it tasting really horrible, and them feeling cheated and never trusting anything or anyone ever again in their life. Maybe there ought to be a stop button on my imagination. Rewind. Back to the 'appetising food photo' bit. Stop.

Rolling stuffed olives in little circles of dough is very therapeutic and reminds me of being 6 years old and discovering playdough. I used to make little playdough cakes and sell them in my pretend shop so I guess I haven't changed. I don't actually have time to make little cheeseballs and I should be doing all kinds of chorse. Sometimes, when you don't have the time, is when it's very important to take time out for making cheeseballs.

Props for the shoot

Amazingly the dough quantities have worked quite well and I have 32 cheeseballs, now in the oven. None of them looks like a 'hero cheeseball', the technical term for an upfront perfect image (at least that's how I understand it). On the other hand, I don't think they'll all have to be out of focus. A food shooter I really admire is TheCrimsonMonkey, whose every food item is a hero, but his images are rocket science and mine are Everycook shots. There is room for many different styles of food shot.I want every human being to think 'That looks good. I can make that.'

Olive balls are in the oven and I'd already set up camera, lights and props. I bought some new tableware for this image and I don't know for sure what will suit. I imagine I'm going to have little brownish balls to shoot, I really liked the green in the tortilla shot and Fernando has that tableware so I looked for something on those lines. Also there's a New Year theme to the magazine so I found some 'papillottes' with no logos on. Papillottes are French chocolates,pralines or sometimes nougat sweets sold for Christmas and New Year, that have jokes, 'dictons' (traditional sayings) or quiz questions in them, a bit like Christmas crackers in the UK. They sometimes have 'crackers' that go bang, but more often not.

Bugger. I forgot and ate the garnish by mistake. Time to check how the cooking's going.

Before a food shoot

Spanish tortilla

'Let's shoot a tortilla', said my photographer friend Fernando when we were staying with him in Madrid. The beauty of this plan from my viewpoint was that he was going to do all the cooking and set up the lights. As is the way in Spain, the suggestion came at 9.00pm when, at home in France, I would usually be watching TV and winding down, not planning the evening meal.

We then went shopping, bought the green place mat, a brown one to go underneath, and lettuce, parsley and green peppers for garnish and to add more green, complementing the yellowish tortilla. Back home, we chose a white plate from Fernando's cupboard, he set up two speedlights, one for back light, one at 90 degrees to bring out texture and then all he had to do was cook.

The perfect tortilla straight from the pan

The tortilla went from frying pan to plate and photo in about 3 minutes and I think the freshness shows. I do know some of the tricks  - salt in beer to keep a head on it, polyurethane varnish on roast chicken - but I prefer to cook, shoot and eat, so I rarely use anything other than a flick of olive oil to improve the appearance of food in my shots.

One advantage of being cook, stylist and photographer - or of course working with Fernando - is that you have control over all aspects of the shoot, including timing.

As I couldn't use Fernando's lights, I wasn't going to bother taking a shot but he nagged me, I set up one speedlight and gave it a try. Moral: if you don't have the perfect set-up, shoot anyway! I like my tortilla shot and of course it has the memories of eating afterwards, nearing midnight, with a beautiful glass of Spanish red - I think it was rioja that time, my favourite.

Before a shoot
1. I list ingredients for the recipe and start the shopping list for what I need to buy.
2. I picture what the food will look like - colour, texture, firmness, shape, quantity are all important but I don't analyse. I know that I can't have a spoonful of tortilla  or a slice of tapenade. If I'm cooking something I can't visualise, I google it to get an idea of what it's supposed to turn out like.
3. I dress up the food different ways in my imagination, often at 3am when I can't sleep. Some people buy a new dress for a special occasion; the shoot is the special occasion for the food, and I want colours and a setting that make it food the star of the show.
4. Go shopping and buy not only the ingredients you need, but any extra props; table linen, crockery, glassware, food extras for show. Photographers often put raw ingredients in the shot with the finished dish, so you need to buy the extras, in perfect condition. I used apples from our orchard in my apple crumble (see previous blog) but I bought three perfect ones as props. They didn't taste as nice.
5. I decide where and when I'm going to shoot, so I can plan the cooking and know what lighting I'll need.
6. Try out the set-up with your props before you prepare the food. Sometimes the colours don't work together as you wanted. Sometimes props like a plate, a baguette or a glass of wine look gigantic and disproportionate when you see what the camera sees. Most food shots are vertical orientation. There's something to do with composition and perspective that just works better, but some buyers like copyspace or room to crop as they choose. I try to take different versions.

Painters come to Provence for the light so I take food outdoors to shoot whenever I can. This has led to salad garnish dancing off into the Mistral, umbrellas keeling over and the mystery of the black, shiny lump in the frame. This was of course the dog's nose. When I shoot food, the dog becomes very interested. She has figured out that the more absorbed I become in looking through the black box, the more chance she has of sneaking up on the goodies and giving a surreptitious lick. So another part of preparation is

7. the anti-dog barricade. Or I make her do a very long downstay. Nowadays she usually just lies down and watches, of her own accord.

Where I shoot
Indoors

harvest basket of fruit and veg, isolated on white

You can make a shoot corner in your kitchen so it's easy to move from cooking to shooting. I use a wheelie trolley with a granite top, backlit by the window, with two speedlights, two umbrellas and a reflector chiming in as necessary.

I'm lucky and have an attic that's been turned into a photography playroom - studio is too grand a word and the ceiling is too low for convenience - so if I'm isolating food on white, I go upstairs into the attic, where I use a skylight plus speedlights and umbrellas, and a glass-topped table.

Spinach salad with orange

Outdoors
I love outdoor light and have three different places with outdoor tables where I can have garden background and natural light, using speedlight and umbrella for fill as required. I sometimes use a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse bright sunlight.

I shot the spinach salad with orange outdoors and I like the out of focus garden, house, summer ambience I get when everything works i.e. when I don't have pouring rain/harsh shadows/flies on the food. This one was for a cookbook request.

I'm not a chef, am self-taught as a cook and I just can't hack it with those perfect food shots where everything is white on white, high key, and precision presentation, so I've made a virtue out of necessity and my style is more country kitchen than restaurant. I devour French gourmet magazines and I love Mediterranean cuisine and style - and colour.


Suppose you want an image of a particular recipe for your website, blog or a cookbook? Nowadays you don't have to commission a food photographer if you don't mind other people using the same image. Just post a Request on istockphoto and a food shooter will respond, often food shooters, plural. You get the exact photo you want for the same price as any stock photo. Why do we sell our work so cheaply? This is the world of stock photography and if you sell the same photo 500 times you make more than for one big commission - well, I can dream, can't I?!

Now you're ready to join me in the Challenge


This is the recipe I've chosen to shoot for a buyer's request. I aim to shoot during the next week, not before Wednesday, and I'll post each stage I go through. If you were shooting this, what would you be thinking and doing to prepare?

The recipe
Olive Balls
Serves 8–10 as appetizer


1 cup cheddar cheese, grated
¼ cup butter, softened
¼ teaspoon paprika
dash Tabasco or other hot sauce
¾ cup all-purpose flour
36–40 tiny pimento stuffed olives


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl, mix together cheese, butter, paprika and hot sauce. Blend in flour. Shape dough into 1½-inch circles. Place olives in center and fold dough around olives to form balls. Refrigerate 10 minutes. Bake on lipped baking sheet for 20 minutes. Serve warm.