When Stephen Segal approached me to put the Nikon Z6 mirrorless through its paces, I thought that the various requirements of the day to day creation of media for a hotel, spa, bar and restaurant would be the ideal testing ground.
Everything needs to happen fast, from production to publication. All the deadlines are “last week, Tuesday” and its a myriad of scenarios with various lighting conditions.
So… this is how we do it.
How do you make somebody “Taste” your image?
One of the specials we have on our New Pashash menu, is a Monday Only Ribs and Wings special. Its a really tasty dish and a favourite of anybody that has ordered it the first time… the trick is:
How do you get them to order it the first time?
We can change the price and make it a value proposition, or we can do give-aways, but at the end of the day, the food must speak. It must do it’s own marketing.
Key points:
Now its fairly simple to make a well plated, “Fine Dining” dish look awesome… a few tricks here and there, some good selective lighting, maybe a nice close-up and bam! sorted…
But a pub lunch? We need to convince the world that the best thing they can do for themselves today is Starch and Calories? Some tasty complex carbs!
The next thing is that EVERYBODY and his uncle is selling rib-&-wing combos… its nothing new or fancy… but ours… the TASTE!… you just want to eat your fingers when the dish is done!
Solution: Catch the emotion around the food.
Setup:
We came in the morning while fairly empty, single LED ringlight across from the table as a light source and rimlights provided by doors to the side and back.
Styling was a very professional affair… I simply let her at it when the food arrived!
Camera setting was simple. Nikon Z6 set to ISO640 (gotta love the fact that essentially up to a few thousand ISO, noise isn’t even a factor anymore, and that the dynamic range still captured outside details!) and shot fairly wide angle and wide open on the 24-70 f/4 (I think I shot at f/4.5 to isolate her from the background a bit.) Shooting at the wide side of the lens cause a bit of distortion on her face and turned my verticals skew, making the shot just a bit more dynamic.
Pro Tip: If you want to blow out the doors/windows, then shoot at a higher ISO. the reduced dynamic range will turn the outside white.
Take-away:
I am quite chuffed with how this turned out. I literally had 15 minutes to shoot this in (and that is more realistic for most shoots… not big setups for 3-4 hours) – Could I have done better? sure… would my result have been better? maybe a bit more polished, but I don’t think I would have reached more people.
Its important to decide how much time you can actually spend on an image, and a lot of that is guided by where it will be used… Social media with a two day lifespan? how can you spend 3 hours? how can you justify it?
