Yesterday, I went to my first meetup with the Seattle Food Styling and Photography Group. I bought along my strobist setup and a couple of noodle dishes as my contribution to the event. Here are some of the pictures.

The first picture was shot in collaboration with Michael Clinard and Kate Hailey, both local Seattle Photographers. Mike is also a lighting tech and production assistant, and wants to try something a little bit unconventional. We ended up using a fill, a snoot for dramatic effect, and a soft fill from my Photek softlighter. You can see a setup shot here:

Here we are building the shot:

First, the snooted 580EXii. (This is the FalconEyes strobe attachment kit, from Shumshuipo, Hong Kong).

Next, we fire just the key light

And here we have the contribution from the fill.

Taken all together, we have the following image:

Snooted flash is at M1/4
Main key is at M1/8
Fill flash is at M1/16
Exposure was ISO100, 1/160sec and f/5.6, on an EF50mm f/1.4USM.

After a little bit of tweaking in LightRoom, I have the following image:

Then it occured to me while chimping reviewing my shots that something didn’t look quite right. I pretended to sit down to the meal and immediately realized that, while the chopsticks placement is cool… it’s completely impractical. Before the noodles soak up too much beef broth, I rearranged the chopsticks and got this:

By the way, I learned something interesting – apparently this is the Chinese way of place setting. Japanese would place the chopsticks closer to the diner, going across the bottom of the placemat, with the handle side facing right, and Koreans would do the same, but across the top instead of the bottom. I’ll file that away under misc trivia.

While the lights are still setup, I went for a few other shots from different angles:

And my typical “Circle cropped” framing, with a close in detail on the ingredients.

In case anyone’s wondering, the veggie is a baby bokchoy. I used my sashimi knife to slice it down the middle, splitting all the leaves evenly, then parboiled it in beef consomme, left over from cooking the sukiyaki beef. One can imagine just how sharp that sashimi knife is. It’s my pride and joy, and I hand-hone it on traditional Japanese waterstones, just like samurai blades of the old, then finish it with 5 micron honing abrasive to a mirror edge on the blade. It can slice a ripe tomato to 1mm (0.040″) slices.

The next dish is my udon dish with kameboko, fish dumplings and sukiyaki beef, in a bonito broth (courtesy of Kikkoman company ).

Here, I just chose a more simple and traditional lighting setup, with a twist. I really want to capture the steam coming off the bowl of noodles. I reasoned that the tightly snooted flash firing across the top of the bowl would probably light the steam nicely. Lighting consisted of a shoot through umbrella camera left as my key light and a bounced flash off the ceiling for fill.

Since there is only a very short time period between when the boiling hot broth being poured into the bowl to when the noodles stop steaming, I set up the camera on a tripod and prefocus everything, then used the cold noodle dish for my lighting test. Here’s the results of the test.

Then the hot bonito stock is poured in. You can see some steam, but it’s lost in the background clutter.

Unhappy with that shot, I unmounted the camera and fired freehand:

Then came the task of splitting up the food and feeding the fellow photogs. The other serving was saved for dinner tonight. Still very yummy