Vine and Dine ( 3 of 4 )

Vine and Dine

For this shoot I wanted a Mediterranean feel - something light and healthy. I liked the patterns on the salmon that seemed to add to the look and gave more detail to the image. There were so many photos that I had taken but unfortunately I was having a bad day in getting the light right. I tried different ideas of having the glass empty, full and half full. I tried taking the photo of the bottle of wine with a large proportion of it on show, but that seemed to suggest that the selling of the wine was to be the focal point. Not being a wine connoisseur I did not want to be caught out by people noticing that I had placed the wrong wine with the food! Hence that is why many of the photos have the label on the bottle not in full view. I found myself placing all of the salad on the plate and had to stop   myself and keep a sense of order. Before I got totally carried away I then emptied the contents of the salad on the plate. This of course looks so much better visually in a controlled jumble, the sprig of parsley seems to place that added finishing touch to the salmon. Some of the images were a little out of focus so they were quickly eliminated. 

Initially I thought that the shoot started off well. A few hundred photos later I became deflated, as I still realised that the lighting needed improving.  The background did not appear white enough for the image that I was trying to produce. It was becoming a nightmare of a photo shoot!

Other elements were becoming problems, such as not getting the rice correctly in focus, and I felt that there was something lacking. Visually it was looking rather flat and badly composed and I thought that this was due to the lack of any garnish and better presentation of the dish. 

For the final 3 I went back over my images and reconsidered one of the shots that I felt was a little out of the box.

 I had initially quickly dismissed this due to feeling that the focus was too much on the wine glass, and the food was dismissed too much in the shot. With the help of Photoshop was able to get the back ground more to my visual liking and the imagery to what I had in mind. The salmon had that great humbug swirl quite visible and everything seemed to balance each other by being evenly in focus .

As for the Indian meal photo I eventually found one that I was contented with.  The main reason why I didn’t choose the other two images were that the Indian meal was still a little out of focus and visually the plate and the wine bottle looked merged together.  I was swaying more towards the salmon salad photo but my eye was always drawn to the large open white area top left. On all of the last 3 images I had put them through Photoshop to accentuate the white background I wanted.      

                                                                                          

 The final image became surprisingly the one that I had much earlier dismissed!

 I was drawn to the “thinking out of the box” approach I took when experimenting with angles and set up. I liked the subtle hint of the meal beyond the glass of wine. I think that the balance between the both is equal and neither is looked at more than the other.