Moving on

It has been a while since I last posted an entry, I've been busy painting a house. That's not to say that things haven't been moving forward with regards to the Salsa recipe book because they have.

In the last post I spoke about having done two photo shoots of Andrew creating scintillating salsa's, of the two rolls of film I had developed and the hope I had that the third roll would round the visual side of things off for us.

Well, it didn't do that. Now don't get me wrong, the photos were great; but Cindy and I agreed that something was missing, that little bit of something that distinguishes the great from the good.

Cindy pointed out the fact that most of the photos were taken from an angle almost directly above the food and dishes, as opposed to your normal side view of cullinary creations. I had purposely done this because I was shooting in a very limited space using available light shed by the moving, and often cloud covered, sun. Added to those limitations, I only had a 28 -80mm lens which ruled out blurring the background, which included many horrible and distracting shadows. But the point was well taken none the less.

So on Friday night, after work, Andrew and I sat down and went through an edited selection of photos, over 40 of them. He loved them, especially the pics of the nuts and chilies; but he too agreed with us that they were missing that pinch of salt to complete things. So, armed with pens and notepads we crited every photo, noting what we liked or didn't and what we could do to improve each pic. A few main areas needing attention were identified.

First of all was the point Cindy had raised, although we thought a few of the pics worked like that. So we need to re-shoot a few of the dishes from a side on angle and incorporate those with the ones we like, to add spice, which was another area of concern for us. We need to, and we were always going to do this, personalise the book with photos of Andrew, as well as add photos showing ideal settings and relevant themes, like textured and coloured fabrics of Mexico.

In line with that, we realized that we will definitely need a better venue to shoot at, a place with space and character, so Andrew is going to try and see if he can organize a place for us. This also ties up with our need to pep up the props a little, both background and foreground, especially the crockery we used. We decided we need to work with white dishes with character, which Andrew will source for us.

Because the shots are close up, little things are magnified, so we realised the need to make sure that everything that gets photographed is as perfect as possible and taking measures to ensure this, like keeping the coriander and whatever perky by storing in the fridge.

To sum things up, we are on the road to success; with what we have done providing the framework for what we need to add to to end up with the polished product. And in terms of the photos, I'd like to add a bit of motion, a bit of blur and a touch of the different to what we have.

Go to: http://www.andrewmendes.blogspot.com to get his perspective.