Bill's Bottom Feeder: Foolin' Around

NO…. not THAT kind of foolin’ around! Where’s your brain at (yes, that’s a preposition)? Remember the Feeder is in his upper 70’s… maybe memories of long ago, but never mind that… Uh, what were we talking about?? Oh, yeah

Lately, spurred by Joanie Simon of The Bite Shot (food photography blog), I have been paying more attention to my innumerable food shots. Pretty much my history has been take the image, suck it into Lightroom (Photoshop “light”), maybe adjust the white balance a bit, crop it some, and BOOM! Put it in the blog. Well, by watching her blog I am learning there is so much more to generating an appetizing image of "food" instead of just taking a picture. Lightroom has such capability and I have been only scratching the surface, kind of like drawing with crayons instead of painting with brushes. So I’ve been experimenting with some of the techniques of post processing she uses (the whole world of lighting the original image is still out there, although B&H has benefited from my increased interest.

So I’ll give you a little peek behind the curtain…(isn’t this fascinating???)

Here is an original shot that I took of some Feeder made fried oysters alongside some on the half shell with house made (by moi) Mignonette sauce. Untouched, just straight out of the camera:

Not bad, documents the stuff, but really doesn’t grab you (me). So I went to work with some of the tools I am learning and although this isn’t great, it does attract your eye a little bit better, but still could use some more pop. A learning experience.

I had a little bit better session with a shot from the Ruddy Duck Seafood and Ale house where we went for lunch.

The original

Which was manipulated into

So, in the future I intend to spend more time on my own shots, and post processing them and also those not generated at the digs. Next time you read a food magazine (which I almost sure you do), take a minute to look at the images of the food. Are the shadows too long? Like the angle? Too much extraneous stuff in the shot? Is your eye drawn to the food? I kind of use the reverse of the old Playboy aphorism “I only read it for the articles”; and say “I only read it for the pictures!”

Speaking of food, have had a couple of outings at restaurants (besides the Ruddy Ale House). One was at the venerable Linda’s for kind of a brunch. Looking for low sodium menu items at that place is a chore among the rashers of bacon, corned beef hash, scrapple all of which taste so good because of liberal uses of SALT. Anyway after a discussion of same with our server, I finally settled for a “Veggie Benedict” it had tomato, avocado, spinach with a poached egg, which sounded manageable. Well, upon presentation, I was served

“Oh, I forgot about the sauce”. Tasted like the ocean. Can’t win

On another occasion I had an early lunch for a (80^th!) birthday celebration of a friend, who ordered the Shepard’s Pie.

Pretty basic stuff. I had their Chicken Souvlaki Pita, and sort of scraped the chicken off the Pita, and it proved a bit “Chewy”, but the Tzatziki sauce helped. I so love this, eating what you must, rather than what you want.

Oh, a entry on the sandwich menu caught my eye:

Exactly WHAT kind of Roll????

Hello Gia!

Holy smoke… hope that was an early “President’s Day” storm! We (SOMD) were predicted to be kind of ground zero and for once they weren’t far off.. Saturday night into Sunday brought maybe four inches, and last night the second punch gave us at least that much more. A wallop, but was kind of pretty this morning