How to Use a Camera
Mini-blog No. 1
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Note to reader: This is my first time using a Canon EOS 60D. I attended workshops and read online tutorials to produce the pieces below.
I love baking. It’s one of my favourite hobbies so I bake occasionally for my roommates. Before taking pictures, I made a list of all the things I wanted to capture to demonstrate the following in baking: wide aperture, low aperture, slow shutter speed, fast shutter speed, and long exposure.
My theme is supposed to capture the baking process of Madeleines, much like a baking blog, but it was hard to capture pieces for fast shutter speed and long exposure. These two demonstrations won’t follow the baking process theme.
Pictures that follow the baking theme were taken in my basement kitchen, so there wasn’t a lot of natural light. To compensate for the light, I turned on all the ceiling lights, opened the blinds, and used additional lamp stands.
For this picture, I was hoping to highlight the importance of this ingredient with this narrow depth of field.
When baking, it’s easy to substitute what may seem like staple ingredients such as butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and leavening agents. However, extracts such as Vanilla is irreplaceable because it doesn’t affect the final form of the baked good — you either add it or you don’t. A teaspoon of vanilla extract gives your final product that oomph of its flavour and essence. You could bake without vanilla extract, but I think adding this ingredient gives my baked goods a depth of flavour apart from it just being sweet from sugar.
I tried moving the object closer and farther and played with the zoom function until I got to this image.
For this picture, I tried to capture a bird-eye view of all the tools and ingredients I used.
Tools: madeleine pan, sifter, large bowl, whisk, spatula.
Ingredients (12 madeleines):
- 1/3 cup unsalted butter
- 3 eggs
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1 tbsp brown sugar
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 tsp honey
- 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
I learned that it’s hard to capture a good image with having a lot of objects in one image from a bird-eye view. This is in addition to the line crack on my kitchen table that I had to work with. I also arranged these objects multiple times and played with the spaces between objects to get a good shot.
I wanted an image that depicted “baking in action”, and I thought pouring the two sugars and salt into the egg mixture would portray that.
I pressed the shutter button with my right hand and poured the sugar in with my left hand. This was difficult, but I managed to get somewhat of a good shot. I couldn’t afford to pour more sugar than needed, otherwise the Madeleines would be ruined from sugar overload!
I think the imperfections of these Madeleines portray homemade goods, rather than perfection from mass commercial production. We all know there’s a bunch of ingredients that’s hard to pronounce in food that’s mass produced.
This is the final product of my Madeleines. For proper cooling, I’ve lifted these butter cakes out of its mould to allow air circulation.
I tried to make this image rustic, but I don’t know if I’ve succeeded or not…
For this image, I tried to capture someone jumping off a structure. I thought this natural body movement of arms swaying and legs flexing portrayed that.
After I bake things, I always share them with my roommates. This is one of them, Faizan, that decided to jump off an old structure in our backyard. He could be on a sugar rush…
I asked him to make all sorts of movements before I saw this structure we had in our backyard. I focused my camera on the spot he would be landing on and took multiple images before picking the one above.
Common kitchen item, I tried to capture this pepper in movement.
For this picture, I set the camera on the kitchen counter and slowly moved the pepper bottle from one side to the other.
From this task, in addition to learning how to use a DSLR camera, I learned the level of effort required to create captivating food images for engaging food blogs and tutorials. Props to some of my favourites, Eugenie Kitchen and Dulce Delight for making be the Baker Wannabe I am today.
