Restaurant Website

I just built a Mexican Restaurant's website in town. It's Ninfa's. It was fun. It was also hard to not be hungry while I was working on it.

I took on the challenge of photographing the food. That was interesting. It actually went better than I thought it would.

When I started researching food photography, I kept seeing stuff like "If you can photograph food, you can photograph anything." That wasn't making me very confident.

And I remember from working at a Digital Photography Studio back in the 90s that it took all day, a food stylist, lots of light, etc.

Well, what I found out was that I needed to use natural light. I almost made the mistake of using my flash. I had them set me up at a table next to a window, I taped a large piece of white paper on the window to diffuse the light, and took along a stretched 2x2 foot canvas to reflect the light on the other side of the window. So the setup was: window, paper, food, camera, then the reflecting canvas.

I didn't figure out how to change the white balance on my camera, and didn't have time to research that, so there's a little blue cast on the shots.

I also photoshopped them a little (mostly just levels move and some dodging and burning). I added some steam to the fajitas by drawing white lines arbitrarily coming up from the food, then taking the smudge tool and massaging the lines, then playing with the opacity. I think they came out pretty good.

Oh, and the camera was on a tripod, and I messed with the shutter speed to get the lighting right.

You can see the photos I took on the website at www.ninfascollegestation.com.

There was actually another shot of some enchiladas with chile con carne on it, but it didn't look good...it was just brown and not much contrast. Truth is, as tasty as enchiladas are, they are very appetising to look at.

Anyway, it was a cool project. Maybe later this year I'll try to convince them to do some flash games on there.