articles - Page 27 of 28 - Nigel Goldsmith photography & film

Food Photography for Kirstie’s Kitchens in Bath

Kirstie’s Kitchen has been producing high quality home made curries in the Bath area for some time and she wanted to update her website with some new images. These were to be documentary style showing the preparation and cooking one of her delicious curries. When I arrived at 10am the air was already full of the smell of exotic herbs and spices and the sound of chopping of fresh ingredients. For two hours the kitchen was a whirlwind of chillies, flashes, coriander, tripods, chickpeas and lens caps. By noon both the curry and photography were finished and we reviewed the images over some dhal and a glass of Cava.

Kirstie’s Kitchen

‘I scream for ice cream!’ PR food photography for Bath based ice cream company

Ice Cream Events in Bath needed some PR photography taken at a historic World War 2 re-enactment event at a local National Trust property. The company markets itself as a vintage brand and they wanted the pictures to capture the atmosphere of the event placing their ‘product’ as an incidental in the pictures rather than a dominant component. The shots had to capture the general atmosphere without placing the business were used for social networking and their website though some of the images have been used for general public relations uses. The also sell very good ice cream.

Ice cream promotional event

Filming Food – Sgroppino

I have taken quite a few photographs for Marshfield Ice Cream but they recently asked me if I would like to have a go at doing some filming for them. Until a month or so ago I hadn’t realised my stills camera could shoot video so I have had a lot to learn. I still have a lot to learn but this is my first attempt.

Hospital portrait – understanding Bokeh

This image was taken in a local hospital earlier today and demonstrates the effective use of a large lens aperture f1.4 to isolate the two subjects in the foreground from the out of focus background. The way a lens renders out of focus detail is referred to its ‘bokeh‘. If you look closely you will see that the large haggered looking subject on the right has one eye in focus while the other is out of focus. This shallow ‘depth of field’ is also associated with larger lens apertures.

According to the Keywords used in the image metadata the smaller and more attractive subject is a Sylvie Goldsmith while the the larger subject is of no interest to the viewer and quite rightly goes un-named. The larger subject would also benefit from some serious work in Photoshop.

In case you are worried the rough looking subject on the right will be teaching at Bath University as normal today.

Bokeh and the newborn baby (Sylvie)

2 Comments

Dad, this old camera is rubbish!!

Rather than packing a point and shoot digital camera when we go on holiday I always like to take one of my veteran film cameras. These cameras still take lovely photographs which have a quality that digital lacks. Most of the pictures taken during the trip to Bangladesh were shot with my twin lens Mamiya C330 rather than the digital SLR that sat gathering dust in the bag next to it.

This year I took my Hasselblad 500 CM, on holiday, the children didn’t appreciate its fine Carl Zeiss optics nor the square picture format. They hated the way everything was back to front and didn’t much like not knowing what they had taken until we returned home. I loved taking every single frame.

The real beauty of this vintage 40 year old camera is that it is completely compatible with modern digital camera backs so, when I want to take a digital shot I just remove the film back and put a digital one on.

Maybe next year I will take the large format Sinar

Grace getting to grips with the Hasselblad 500cm. Picture taken with an Apple telephone

Grace getting to grips with the Hasselblad. Picture taken with an Apple telephone