Sour Cream Omelette

If you find the refrigerator almost empty, just like it happened to me last evening, then this recipe could be pretty convenient.
Most of its ingredients, except the eggs, can be replaced with what you have at disposal and you can still managed to prepare a dish that will make a nice impression when served.
For example I had to use the sour cream, because its life was running out, but you can use cottage cheese, cream cheese, mascarpone, normal cream, maybe just a bit thicken up, or a mixture of everything.

Ingredients for 2 omelettes
6 tablespoons sour cream
1 tablespoon chives
2 eggs
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons grated pecorino cheese
salt
pepper

Preparation
Separate the yolks and whip the egg whites, mix the yolks with 2 tablespoons of sour cream, a pinch of salt and a bit of ground pepper. Add the whipped whites little by little, stirring gently, so to prepare a very soft mixture. Melt the butter in a frying pan, pour into the mixture and cook over low heat for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, stir together the remaining sour cream with the chopped chives. Remove the omelette from the pan, fill with the sour cream mixture, fold in half and cook for another couple of minutes. Serve sprinkled with the grated pecorino cheese.

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Autumn and Some News

With the coming of Autumn Food-0-grafia is gearing up to become more and more a kind of virtual magazine of food and photography and... everything that is in between.

This means that there will be recipes still, be prepared to some good seasonal ones, but even more articles on photography related, but not exclusively, to the food world.

This is the reason why you could have noticed a momentary slow down in posts in the latest days, but it is a kind of run-up to prepare a better and more interesting blog where you can find arguments, suggestions and ideas that won't be the same old recipe of Aunt Mary or the technicalities of some photo sites that at the end do not teach you how to capture an image. All this will be presented in a more orderly and enjoyable way, a kind of blog "to browse through" like a magazine.

Furthermore, I'm also setting up a new studio which, while eating away some other of my time, it will certainly improve the quality of my shooting, if not just because I'll have more space and light available.

A lot of news and hard work and soon you will see the results.


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Food Photography: Continuos Lights

Do you have time to take pictures only late in the evening? Is the room where you shoot dimly lighted by small windows?
This post continues the analysis of the basics of food photography describing the more (theorically) "simple" systems of photographic lighting: the continuos light ones.

It is called continuous light because lighting is produced by lamps, enabling you to see their effect in real time as it resembles the behavior of natural light. For that reason it is sometimes preferred to flash lighting whose effects on the scene are not always easy to be "predicted".

The continuous light is the lighting system used in movie sets and television studios and in all those occasions where it is necessary to reproduce motion scenes and therefore, for obvious reasons, you can not use flash lights.

Given those benefits you'll wonder why these devices aren't always used: as I'll list the various kinds of continuous light on the market you will understand that, as in all things, there are drawbacks and compromises to which the user must submit.

Hot Lights

They are the most "ancient" continuous light devices as they are in practice nothing diffirent than iridescent bulbs (tungsten bulbs as in the old lamps you always used at home) or, more recently, quartz (also called halogens).
The advantage of low cost (you can also use some equipment not specific to photography) is however balanced by three major drawbacks: the first is that they are hot. DAMN HOT. Especially in relation to the power of light emitted.
That is in fact the second problem.
Since they are energy-inefficient, to illuminate a scene so you can use slower shutter speeds and low ISO sensitivity you'd need hot lights from 2-3000 watts up.
They are therefore not the best choice if you have to shoot people in small rooms unless you want to experience what the food could feel in the oven.
Instead for shooting food, which is usually pretty "static", you can use less power, from 500 to 1000 watts.

Apart the heat problems (forget to shoot parfaits, ice cream, etc. with hot lights) if you need to "modify" the light (to make it softer, thereby targeting, etc.) you'd need to use specific photographical accessories that must withstand high temperatures, whose high cost erases in part (if not entirely) the economical advantage of which I formerly spoke.
Above all you must really be careful with certain materials like paper, and other highly flammable, because the risks they take fire if too close to the lights are real (I tell you from personal experience).
The third problem with this type of light is the "color" they produce which is "red" and "hot" and must be balanced at shooting time or, in a worse way, in post production (as I described in this post).

Cold Lights (Fluorescent Lights)

Fluorescent lights have had a significant technological improvement recently. Just few years ago there were little differences between them and the usual office "neon" lights. They have good energy efficiency, with the same watt power they emit a lot more light than hot lights. They also have the considerable advantage of being considerably less hot, for this reason they soon came to be part of photography and video equipment. Take also in count that the color of he light emitted, which in old fluorescent lights was one of the most difficult to control because of its unpredictable greenish tint, with modern light daylight lamps is considerably closer to the sunlight (the famous 5500 degrees Kelvin, do you remember it?).

Which are the disadvantages then? The biggest is that fluorescent lights are more "cumbersome", for the same power, than hot lights, not to talk about flash lights. Another problem is that both the power than the "daylight" term are used in in a very "optimistic" way by the light makers.
The ratio of 1 to 5 with hot lights (ie a 20 watt fluorescent bulb should do the same light as a 100 watt tungsten) is quite debatable indeed, by personal practical experience is actually more closer to 1 to 4, while "daylight" lamps produce a light with a color of about 4000-4500 degrees Kelvin, thus necessitating a white balance correction anyway.
Despite these limitations, that prevent fluorescent light systems to have the whole range of accessories available to flash systems, they remains a good choice especially for those, like us, need to take pictures of static subjects such as food and therefore do not need of high power lighting.
Personally I also prefer because them because light emitted in a continuous way makes easier to shoot photos that looks like they were taken with natural light, which is still the best way to make food look appetizing.

HMI lights (Hydrargyrum Medium-arc Iodide)

They are similar to fluorescent lights but they allow to build systems of much higher power, that are therefore the most used in the movie industry.

If you do not really have a lot of money and need to light a REALLY huge photo set do not even think about them, they are also very bulky and heavy as they use ballasts to adjust the voltage.

The next post I will write about the various accessories that "modify" the light and then I will continue describing the flash light systems that are the most "complete" for those who want to do studio photography.

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Food Photography: White Balance

Sorry for the last days where I updated the blog less frequently but various works and the purchase of a new studio (with all the included bureaucracy) has been keeping me quite busy. " Every cloud has a silver lining" , you could tell me, but unfortunately the day is only of 24 hours (damn!) and it would make no sense to write crap just to post something new.

As I promised in this earlier post I'm starting today a series of posts explaining the various techniques of lighting and shooting that are used in the photography of food.

Let's start on the subject, for so many mysterious, called "white balance".


Light has color


Have you ever noticed how at sunrise or sunset the light has a color different than at noon? Or as in a cloudy day everything seems more "blue-gray" than in a sunny day?
The reason is that light has a color or, rather, a temperature that, conventionally, is indicated in Kelvin degrees.

Despite what you might think at lower temperatures corresponds a "warmer" (ie, tending to red) color of light  while, at higher temperatures, the light color becomes colder (ie, bluish).

You'll wonder "Why should I care about all this almost non-sense stuff?".
If you want to be a photographer you should care about it a lot because our eyes automatically balances the light, mostly eliminating its color,  while both films and digital sensors do not, with the result that, for example, a scene illuminated by a tungsten light bulb will appear in a photo with a pronunced "red" cast.


Here is a simple "table" of colors of light depending on its nature:

As you can see the light of  tungsten light bulbs is red-orange, but also the one from conventional fluorescent bulbs is yellow-orange, despite it seems pretty "white" to our eyes.


Let's talk then about the concept of white balance.


To understand it, just pay enough attention how our brain make us feel "whitish" colored light, such as the one produced by those light bulbs, shifting all the colors so that a light about 2700 degrees Kelvin "hot" would appear similar to sunlight at noon (which is 5500 degrees Kelvin).


With film based photography, there was no way to use a trick similar to the one used by our brain. You had to use filters to neutralize a colored light (ie a blue filter neutralizes, alas it makes white, a red light) or use films specially designed for the different types of light (ie tungsten, the normal old light bulbs).


Digital allows us, instead, to use exactly the same procedure that use our brain, and in an even more efficient way. The white balance can be set before taking the picture, telling the camera which light we are shooting under, or in post production, that is, a photo editing program, selecting a point on the picture where we know that can be found a neutral color (alas a shade of gray).


In digital SLR cameras (but also in many advanced compact cameras) there is a similar menu where you can set the "color" of light of the "scene" you are shooting.

AWB means that the camera will try to "guess" the temperature of the light.
The various symbols depict the most common lighting conditions you can meet (in order the sun at noon, shade, overcast daylight, incadescente bulb, fluorescent bulb, flashlight, exact value, value settable by wheel selection) .

In post-production you can balance the white using various tools, the usually more convenient to use is "levels" where you can see the histogram of the photo and where there are three different eyedroppers: one black, one gray, one white.

The one to set the white balance is the grey eyedropper, circled in red in the picture (which shows the Layers window of GIMP, Photoshop and other programs are similar). Click on the eyedropper to select it then press again with the mouse over an area of the image where there is a neutral color "colored" by the light (eg a white tablecloth or a plate).


You will see therefore change all the colors of the image that will, hopefully, be then similar if you had photographed it with sunlight.



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Nomads

Also today no new recipe.

Excuse me, but I had neglected for so long my other photos like this shot that I scanned just last night.

Honestly I would not like to describe it, and maybe I would not know how to either. Maybe there's only to see.


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United Colors

Every now and then I remember that I am also a photographer and that my job is to capture images that are not just food related.
I had to take editorial fashion accessories shots yesterday and I got this idea to make things a little more fun .
What do you think? This shoe is originally black or brown? :D

Monte Bianco Coffee

Who among you does not need to pamper herself a bit in the morning when she awakes? Today post is not really a recipe, it's a cure against awakening stress. And I assure you that it works!
Ingredients for 2 servings
2 espresso coffees
2 tablespoons whipped cream
2 egg whites
1⅛ cup confectioners' sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon cocoa powder

Preparation
First prepare meringues the night before (or even a few days before, they do not rot, lol!) whipping the two egg whites with the lemon juice. Gradually add sugar while continuing to whip until it dissolves completely. With a spoon or a sac a poche create some small piles of mixture over an oven tray covered with baking paper. Bake at 175-210F for about 3 hours. Prepare the espresso coffee into two cupa, add to each a tablespoon of whipped cream and a meringue at top. Sprinkle with cocoa before serving.

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Tuscan Bean and Pasta Soup

When you browse cookbooks about "traditional" Italian cooking written by english speaking authors there's always a high risk of finding recipes collected here and there and 'modified' (if not distorted) in a way that a native can not help but smile sadly.
This is not the case with 'Secrets from My Tuscan Kitchen', a Tuscan cookbook written by my friend Judy Witts Francini who, thanks to the fact of living in Tuscany for 25 years, manages to tell you how food is really cooked today in this wonderful Italian region.
Browsing through it I found myself thrown into my childhood and the dishes that I ate with my Florentine father.
I'm suggesting you one that I have in my heart and I found, identically described to what I remembered, in Judy's cookbook.

Ingredients for 4 servings
4 cups of cooked beans (navy or pinto)
14 oz. macaroni (short type is better)
3 cloves of garlic
1 branch of fresh sage
1 branch of rosemary
tomato paste
4 tablespoons of olive oil
salt


Preparation
Sautè the garlic cloves, the rosemary and the sage in the oil. When the garlic becomes golden, throw all the vegetables away and save the oil.
Puree the beans together with their cooking liquid, adding some water to thin if needed.
Pour into a pot, add some tomato paste to make the soup a bit pinkish and put it to boil. Add salt and pasta and let cook for about ten minutes, adding water if necessary (it's a matter of taste, I prefer the soup to be so thick that a spoon wouldn't fall if placed inside it). Pour into the serving plates, drizzling with the oil you previously prepared.

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