Chocolate Fondant

 

There's this restaurant in Maadi (one of the nice places in Cairo) that has a very famous dessert, they call it "Chocolate Fondant". People go there just for this dessert, I went with my family last weekend, and we had a very swell time.

 

 

This is how it looks like, it is normally served with one scoop of vanilla ice cream, but this time I ordered an extra one. See that sponge cake in the middle? Don't let it fool you, once you dig the spoon inside, delicious molten chocolate gushes out of this cake, the dark hot taste of chocolate with the cold vanilla ice cream is just exotic.

 

The place is elegentaly and simply decorated from inside and they service is very good, I would recommend it to anyone to go and try this dish.

 

 

I was armed with my 5D Mark II and the excellent 50mm f/1.4 lens, lighting was tungsten spotlights from above, and I like the warm white balance used.

 

And this is how much I enjoyed the dessert, no traces to be found. :-)

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Food Photography Assignment

I was asked by one of my friends to shoot a couple of dishes for his cousin's restaurant, and since I wanted to experiment with shooting food, I readily agreed. Click through for the details.


It's no secret that I never shot a paid assignment before. Although 95% of my photos are of people (mainly family and friends), I never warmed up to the idea of shooting other people for money, whether it's portraiture, weddings, etc... However, I am fine with shooting non-animate objects, I shoot some female dresses & accessories for a project run by family members, and very recently one of my friends convinced me to start a business out of food photography, fine by me, so I used this opportunity as a test to see how the experience and the photos turn out.



Before going, I asked my friend (who went there before) about the location, the lighting used there, the colors of the walls (for bounce flash), and what did the client want to shoot and for what reason. Turns out the client was offering a very competitive price on one of their cheese burgers, and he wanted a close up of the sandwich to show its size and components for the ad. I was also told that the restaurant walls were beige, and the lighting there is very dim.



Being my first assignment in front of a client I don't know, I was worried I'd miss some piece of equipment that I left at home, originally, I knew I'd be using the 100mm Macro and bounce flash, but I brought along the lightstands and umbrellas, just in case. My equipment included the 5D Mark II, the 100 Macro L, the 24-105 in case I needed some wide angle shots and a couple of 580EX speedlites.

This was the main course I came to take photos of, but as you see, it was not very well presented, especially the bread, but that's what I had to photograph, in the next photo you will see a closeup where I tried to hide the bread's defects.

Simple as it is, taste wise, I certify that this is one delicious burger, the restaurant makes their own beef burgers, they don't buy frozen burgers and just fry it. Lighting wise, I was using on camera flash, usually bounced upwards and to my right in most of the shots, I varied the FEC based on what the histogram told me, I was working between +2 2/3 and +3 FEC, for some reason the camera decided that the correct exposure was way less than what I wanted. Before I shot any dishes, I used a grey card to adjust my white balance.

Next dish was a vegetarian pizza, using the same setup I took the obligatory full dish photo, and then I started trying to get more interesting angles (to hide the fact the pizza's edges are not a perfect circle like the dish) and imagining how they would look in the menu. Since I was shooting close, with a long lens and a full frame sensor, sometimes the DoF was plain shallow, so I varied my aperture based on the look I wanted, I was working between f/4 and f/8.

I think the photo above works better than the full dish. The last dish to shoot was a Fettucini pasta, this was the best prepared dish and easily looked good in photos without trying to get different angles to hide defects.

When I finished shooting, I uploaded the pictures from the camera to the iPad using the camera connection kit (iPad displays RAW photos) as a backup and to show them to the client, then we went through the pictures (~ 70) quickly, then we selected the photos the client wanted and deleted the rejected ones. This way when I got home, I plugged the iPad to my PC, and imported the photos directly into lightroom, no need for selecting or rating photos.



I learned a lot from that day, and we all agreed (me, my friend and the client) that the dishes needed better presentation next time we do a shoot. I am also looking online for more tips on how to make the dishes look better (using oil, etc...), so if you have any advice, please tell me in the comments.

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Update

Sorry for the lack of blog posts from me.  I've been busy lately because of work and because I did a prom shoot last weekend and have been editing the shots.  I will do a blog post on that at some point.  Meanwhile here are some of the reviews that I will be posting beginning next week:

• Sigma 50 1.4 - It's more expensive than Canon's or Nikon's 50 1.4.  Why would a cheap guy like me get one?
• Nikon 24-70.
• Tokina 11-16 - I had a Sigma 10-20 just a couple of months ago and I liked it so much... I sold it (!?) and got this ultrawide.  Is it worth the extra cost?
• Tokina 10-17 Fisheye review, plus tips for using fisheyes as opposed to a rectilinear ultrawide.
• UV Filters: high end filter vs. cheap filter vs. no filter.
• Nikon 70-200 VR.
• Sigma 50-150 (non-OS) vs. Nikon 70-200 VR.  Comparison of depth of field, slowest usable shutter speed, etc.

EDIT: links posted above for the posts I've finished.

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Lots of Canon Updates

Canon Rumors is obviously a rumors site, and I used to never care about rumors since they might not be true, until recently when I discovered that rumors "doesn't equal" not true, it might just mean that information is not official yet, and the site owner also has lots of trusted sources. I started following the site a while back, and I found it accurate enough, and anything that reaches the [CR3] rating, is pretty much on the money, so what's new to report?



1- Canon 650D (Rebel T4i)
18 MP sensor (not sure if it's the same as the 650D), 9 cross-type AF points, touchscreen LCD and continuous AF in video, there's also a new EF-S 18-135mm lens rumored to feature silent focusing motor to work with the continuous AF in video.

2- Canon EF 40mm f/2.8 Pancake
A very slim and light lens with a not-so-common focal length, rumored to be around the $300 price mark.

3- Canon Announcing 2 non-P&S Cameras In June
Certainly an exciting piece of news, one of them is almost certain to be the Canon 650D, the other one is said to be a mirror-less camera, and I hope it is. There are lots of speculation about a 70D and a 7D Mark II, but nothing true yet.

4- Official Discontinued Products
Most importantly the Canon 24-70 and the 580EX II speedlite, now when I'm in the market for a new flash, I might as well buy the 600EX-RT, and why not a 2012 body (5D Mark III?) to make sure all the wireless features work?

I have always been quite intrigued with small mirror-less & EVF cameras, but recently my interest peaked a lot with the Olympus OM-D EM-5, the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 and the Olympus 45mm f/1.8. With such fast lenses you still have some control over the DoF with a Micro 4/3 sensor, and the image quality at high ISO has come a long way through. What is more interesting is that Amazon had an offer on the Panasonic GF3 with the 14mm f/2.5 pancake for a $314, that is an amazing value for such a camera despite it not having lots of buttons or a viewfinder, I would take that over the Canon G11 and it's brethren any day.

What does this have to do with the announcements, you say? One thing, mirrorless cameras, I want a small good one, I am waiting for a really attractive offer (sub $800) for a good mirrorless compact with a good EVF and just one 50mm equivalent fast lens.

RELATED POSTS:
Olympus OM-D First Impressions and Comments on DOF
Hands-On: Canon 40mm Pancake
Canon 60D vs. 550D (and 600D)

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Tonal Adjustments in Lightroom 4

I came across this very useful post talking about tonal adjustments in lightroom, I believe this is a must read post, I enjoyed it a lot.

 

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Shooting Football - 5D MarkII + 200mm f/2.8

Our company has organized a football tournament between the different departments, and I went last week to one of the games to cheer for my colleagues' team and try out my 5D's tracking along with the 200mm f/2.8. I ended up enjoying the game (my colleagues won 5-4), but the photography experience was disasterous. Click to read more.

As usual I took the camera and one lens, I wanted to see how the Canon 5D's continuous focusing and 4fps fares in such conditions, my lens of choice was the 200mm f/2.8, I have already shot a few football games with my 60D + a 35mm and an 85mm, the 85mm on a crop sensor gave me enough reach from the sidelines, so I thought a 200mm focal length would be enough, especially that it would enable me to stand farther away, well, things didn't turn out very good.


See that opening picture? Look carefully, can you see the sidelines? Can you see the wall behind the sidelines? The court was in the middle of a very crowded buildings area, so the space was barely enough for the football field, with no place to stand far away, first problem, the 200mm was too long, and ai could barely fit people on the other end of the field.

See that ugly yellow wall and those ugly player colors? Second problem, the lights used in the field had a wierd color temperature, I tried setting a custom WB before shooting, but the colors turned very bad, so I shot RAW anyway and decided to tackle this matter in post, nothing worked, the photo you see above has major color tweaking (hue & saturation) done in post, it is as close as I could get to what I saw there, and to make matters worse, there were these awful yellow colored walls behind the players most of the time, at the end I made another copy of the photos in B&W to hide these problems, what do you think? Which ones are better?

Third problem, light levels were very very low, it isn't my first time shooting football, and I usually end up shooting f/2.8 at ISO 1600 or something to get reasonable shutter speeds, not here. I used manual mode, lens wide open at f/2.8, and in order to get 1/320 ~ 1/400 shutter speeds, I had to increase the ISO to 12,800 (first expansion ISO, not native), all these pictures you see here at shot at that ISO, and I used my usual luminance noise reduction in LR4 at 20, didn't spend anytime trying to get rid of the noise, pictures just aren't worth it.

To sum it up, the 5D did well in tracking the action, I don't think I had OOF shots, and I like the B&W shots much more because they don't show the ugly colors and they seem to hide (or maybe suit?) the noise pattern. What do you think?

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Workflow Tip: Sort in Reverse

Here's a simple tip for sorting through your photos during post-processing: try reviewing them in reverse.

I usually take several shots of a particular subject, and I tend to get new ideas as I shoot, so my best shots tend to be my latter shots.  It also takes me time to warm up the photography neurons in my brain so that as a whole, my shots later in the day tend to be better.  By sorting in reverse, I find the better shots faster and I can go through the other shots more ruthlessly. :)

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