it was a nice opportunity given by my trusted friend Rashed..... he needed some photos for his newly founded restaurant, and I needed some practice...... it all turned out to be a nice bit of experience..... it was not just work, in the end..... our families also had a nice time during the day..... the children especially, had a great day, which made us happy..... it was a particularly warm day, and the weather was accentuated by frequent load-shedding by the electricity department......
Cafe Higin's aim was more to attract the customers, rather than just giving a glimpse of whats on offer.... this aim made us switch from whole dishes to close-ups..... I was never in doubt about what lens I would be using once we decided to go close.... the Sigma APO 150mm f2.8 EX DG Macro....... my trusted horse..... it puts most of the background out of focus, thus makes framing so much easier.... I shot a lotta apertures to adjust to different light and depth requirements.... used most apertures between f4.5 and f16.....
it was daytime, so I used the natural light coming through the huge glass window, acting as a big softbox..... I kept the natural light as backlight, not only to blow out the background, but also to give that glossy edge on the yummy items.... I quickly knew that I needed another light source as fill light in front of the food items...... an SB-900 with a shoot-through umbrella did the job for me...... I used the SU-800 as trigger..... I was shooting indoors, so not issues with using IR triggers..... it surely is much more convenient than radio triggers.....
using the ambient light was a bit of a pain though, requiring much lower shutter speeds (1/15-1/40sec).... had to depend on a tripod to keep the camera stable..... for some shots, I also brought out a second flash to give rim light, but that didn't come out to be very prominent.... there were quite a few items that we couldn't do because of unavailability and time shortage...... so, another session is required to complete the job.....
