I got a call from my good friend and restauranteur, Rocco, about some food photos for his upcoming website. So, yesterday I headed out to the west end. We ate some of his famous chicken and angel hair pasta in a rose sauce with, my personal favourite, veal on a bun. If you are ever in the area you should stop by and try it; I ask them to add cheese, tomato sauce and roasted peppers to mine, it is out of this world!
Here’s a little blurb I wrote about my thoughts of Rocco’s restaurant, with photos from the shoot.
Encompassing the bright colors of Carnevale and the simplicity inherent in a homemade meal, you can smell the kitchen as you walk through the door of Rocco’s Plum Tomato and immediately know you’re among family. A trattoria style eating establishment, it simulates Italian-style classic pizzerias of Naples and the fine dining experiences in Rome. Rocco’s Plum Tomato falls faithfully in this category by bringing regional and local recipes of Italy to Toronto and Etobicoke. True to tradition, you will find this establishment to have a large staple menu made up of ancestral antipasti, pasta dishes, carne, seafood and pizza. Watch out for seasonal specials that come to life when Rocco tinkers in the kitchen! Always fresh and fantastic, widely reviewed as the finest exemplar of time honored Italian cuisine in the GTA, Rocco’s Plum Tomato welcomes you to sit at their table.
Just got back from 33 days in Sicily, Italy. What a trip it was! We stayed in and spent most of our time in Floridia, a small town just west of Syracuse and the place my grandparents emigrated from; holding a very special place in my heart. The island’s East coast was a little chilly, especially this winter, but most days were between 10 and 15 degrees. The houses are built to keep cool during the very hot summers and aren’t centrally heated so the nights were especially cold, averaging about 5 degrees. To keep ourselves busy, we made some amazing sight seeing trips.
The lead photo is the port in Syracuse on our second visit to the city. There are somes shots from Floridia, Taormina; which is built into the hillsides of the North East coast, and Noto; a short drive south of where we were staying. Some of my favorites are from Palermo, the capital city. We were lucky enough to take a bus from Syracuse and spent three days there; two wandering through the city and one a short ride away in Monreale, a small town and commune just outside the capital. At the end there are some of the floats we saw at the Carnevale in Palazzolo.
Thank you to everyone who took time out of their lives to show us around and feed us. Oh did you feed us!!
As you have probably noticed there has not been a post since WAY back in November. It has been crazy busy working on a personal project which will be posting on Monday February 7th, in conjunction with a group from the University of Western Ontario. They are a fantastic group of girls who will be releasing their side of the project at Brescia College. We hope you stop back next Monday for a write up on the inspiring work they are doing and to see photos by Vince here at Pipe Dream Photo.
We shot an AMAZING wedding in the dominican and the weather there just blew us away. This great place to shoot was made even better by such an amazing couple! This wedding was especially fun for me because the beautiful bride is my cousin Cristina. We had a few days on the beach before the wedding and that gave me time to hang out with the groom Lou, I have to say that Cristina is very lucky, then again she always has had great taste! This small but intimate group wedding is one of the most fantastic ways to tie the knot! All the best wishes in your marriage, Lou + Cristina Muraca may you always remember October 14th 2010 as one of the happiest days if your life. Salute!!
Decided to go with a classic today, marinaded overnight in my secret BBQ sauce, infused with white wine durning baking. Fall off the bone chicken wings!
By the way, I am on the look out for more wing sauces. If you have a good one please leave it in the comments so I can try it.
I would like to thank coffee, oh how I lovest thou. So since I have other things to do today I had the brilliant idea that I would get up at 6 so I could make and shoot my breakfast burrito. Sautéed onions and garlic, toss in some diced tomatoes and red peppers, let them simmer with the lid on for 5, while they are flavouring up I whisked up the eggs added about a tbs of milk and all my favourite herbs, basil, oregano, thyme, parsley, some salt and pepper and another quick whisk to mix it all up. I take half the simmered tomato, garlic, onion, pepper mixture (which now smells like heaven and has woken up my sick girlfriend) and set it aside in a bowl, throw the egg into the pan with whats left of the mix and scramble. Take it off the heat when the eggs are all solidified, lay them in the middle of a tortilla shell (I like the giant jalapeno cheddar ones) top the egg with the rest of the tomato mix, cheddar cheese slices on top, roll it up. I like toothpicks to hold all together. So it turns out, to my great dissatisfaction that my unit doesn’t have any windows that face the sunrise after trying a bunch if long exposures I gave up and turned on my lights, it smelled so good I only took one picture:
When I said that I was caught up…. it only lasted until the end of that post. I shot a wedding in toronto this weekend, had some fun with my family who I miss all the time now that I am away in London (don’t tell them I said that) and came back and had a TON of work to do, as well Anj is getting sick so I’ve been taking care of her. Here are the last 7, count them – SEVEN days. Some have galleries, some don’t. I ran out of light when I cooked the steak, its the last gallery and it is shot with flash instead of natural light. Enjoy!
Chopped Garlic
Tomato Salad – with Gallery
Nachos – with Gallery
Fresh Sliced Avocado
Spinach Salad with Garlic, Onions and Herb Vinaigrette (Before and After) – with Gallery
Herb and Garlic Butter – with Gallery
Steak: Grilled with garlic marinade + Green Beans topped with Garlic Butter – with Gallery
These two sets put me on schedule for 1 post a day since the 7th:
Sept 15th
Triple decker Grilled Cheese with green apple, cheddar and jalapeño mozzarella
Spet 14th
Cookies for home made Oreos
I have tomorrow off, should be a nice little break and I need to get some shopping done. It is amazing how much food you go through when your cooking every day!
The headcount topped 420 this year, thats a massive turnout over last years 330. Unfortunately I only caught the initial run down from Young and St. Clair as I had a meeting right after. Next year I am defiantly going to follow the entire run. Here are my favourite 24, remember to click the photo for the full gallery:
Ite, jumped into a whole new ball of wax yesterday and made a bunch of new friends in London which was great fun. On the flip-side I didn’t get my Sunday or Monday posts up so here they are for your viewing (-I presume pleasure):
Sept 13th
Sept 12th
This does not get me caught up because I haven’t posted todays image, but I’ll aim for 2 tomorrow. This weekend is a wedding weekend in toronto which means another crazy adventure on the greyhound and probably falling behind again. I am still going through the BoardMeeting images, long boarders can see those soon.
Didn’t have a lot to work with in pickering and I was out at the Ontario Longboarding – Toronto Board Meeting today. Over 400 long boarders showed up today for the ride down young street, but more on that later. Today just some simple fruit by the window.
Sept 10th
I missed yesterdays post because I was on my way to toronto, which was an interesting experience this time. I made a chutney with nectarines, green chillies, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. Put it on a cracker an have a spicy little snack.
Tonight for dinner was home made Chicken Cacciatore on a bed of fried rice. Shot with a 60mm macro and a window. The tricky thing about windows is they are anything but consistent. Light was moving all over, in and out of clouds, the saving grace of this shot was actually a 42″ silver reflector that allowed me to light up the left side of the image. I’ll be back in toronto for the weekend for the board meeting, I’ll do my best to post everyday.
After watching the Penny de los Santos interview on Chase Jarvis live, I was amazed at the quality and beauty of photos all made in the moment with natural light. For those of you who haven’t seen it you can check it out :
Totally awesome stuff from Penny and Barnaby. I am a huge foodie and hopped over to Foodista as soon as I was done the video, then popped over to Saveur magazine to check out there stuff. Really inspiring. I love food, wine and coffee, it started me thinking about how much time I spend in studio reproducing natural window light. So I am starting a little project for myself, 1 photo series each day until the end of the month using just natural light + it must be food / wine / coffee / kitchen related. Easy enough right? I think so…. here it goes, yesterdays lunch was Mutter Paneer a north indian dish made of peas and a delicious cheese called paneer. Great spice to it, served over rice like a gravy. MMMMMMMMMMM!
DELICIOUS! Should have another post up before midnight to cover todays image.
Its been crazy this month. So much going on!
Just finished 2 commercial jobs, feel free to take a look (click images for galleries) :
Photos for JP+Co. at ICI Bistro just west of Bathurst on Harbord Street. At 538 Manning Avenue you will find world class chef Jean-Pierre Challet serving delicious classic french dishes. JP is the author of One Pot French, full of easy authentic french recipes. For more information you can contact ICI Bistro at (416) 536-0079. Bon Appetit!
Just finished this shoot for StraightPokerSupplies.com . A canadian poker supplier based in the east end of toronto. You can contact them for all of your poker needs : 647 477-5087 . They have an excellent selection of chips, cards and some very beautiful tables. Tell them I sent you!
DJBenjabs rocks the HOUSE! Take a look. Click photo for the full gallery.
He was UNBELIEVABLE. I had such a good time, I think the only way to top it is to go see him play again. Stay tuned for information on when he will be playing next!
After a very restful week of vacation its back to work today.
Friday Feb. 26th we will be doing a large party shoot for DJBenjabs. If you are in toronto feel free to stop by and have some fun! All the info is available HERE . If you have any questions contact me through the website at www.pipedreamphotography.com
The first thing to take into account is that photoshop uses tools that select based on similarity, you must have an evenly lit background if you want to be able to select it and remove it in photoshop effectively. Since the extraction is based on selecting the green screen, you want to keep that green as close to the same tone as possible.
I want the chroma to be the same f-stop as my main light. This keeps everything nice and bright and means that my camera settings are really easy. I’m using a 9 foot background and one light on either side to light it. The lights are about 4 to 6 feet from the background. To make the light super even you’ll need to have the lights crossing each other (your right light is lighting the left side of you background and vice versa) this gives the light a little time to spread out keeping hot spots from appearing on the background. Our background lighting set up looked like this from camera position:
You want to loosely set-up your lights and then start metering. Thats right, dust off your meter and start checking the background. I use f/8 so that I have enough DOF for my subject (like I said earlier, my background and my main light will be the same intensity) so if I want to shoot at f/8 then I will be tweaking my lights until the center, left, and right of the chroma read f/8. If one side is brighter you willl need to do one of the following;
-change the angle of your lights
-move your lights father away
-adjust the power of the lights
It will require a combo of all three on both lights to get an evenly exposed chroma. Do tests! Do them before you go on location. Its much easier to set-up under pressure if you know the approximate set-up ahead of time. This will cut your set-up time in half and your cuss words will be reduced by about 72% (yes I stole that cuss word bit from Zack Arias …… get over it). Speaking of the One Light Master there are some space requirements that we need to cover. I do the basics, if you want to see where I took my info from the link isZack Arias’ multi-part studio set-up blog post. A 20×20 foot space is what you need, due to our initial tests and the space constraints of our client we asked for 10×15, this made relative sense to us as our background is 9 feet wide and lights are pretty small on each side. Now….. most of you are like cool, that works, right? NOPE! As we realized the average light stand has a footprint of about 3.5-4 feet (call it 4 for mathematical simplicity). About 2 feet of that is going to overlap your background stands, BUT 2 feet won’t. So you realistically looking at about 9 + 4 feet (2 on each side) that 13’s. Not 9 like we budgeted for, luckily there was a bit of extra room for us to work with, 15-20 feet would have kept the profanity in check better.
As far as length goes there is no question, you need 20 feet. When lighting the background, that light (which is green because its bouncing off a green source) is bouncing back and hitting the subject. This will give the subject (especially their hair) a green cast on there edges, causing you a lot of grief in the extraction. Keep this a minimum too, move your subject at least 10 feet from the background. Do a meter reading of the back of the subjects’ head without your main and fill light on The light bouncing off the background and hitting your subject should be at least 2-3 stops under your main light. If your main is f/8, the bounce back should be under f/4, preferably f/2.8.
The other benefit of moving your subject off of the background is that the lights on the subject no longer affect the background. This keeps those lights from creating hot spots or shadows that will interfere with your extraction. The lighting is up to you I like small softboxs in this situation. This project was clean soft light, fill light above camera position high, and main light camera left, high and on a 45 degree angle to the subject. The fill lights power was set a half stop under the main. The main was f/8 (the same as the background so that everything’s copacetic) this makes the fill about 5 and a half (photo translation about f/6.3). The benefit of this set-up is if some of that green light from the background gets on to your subject (which it should not) the soft even light from the softboxs will wash the green out. As well soft boxs are very directional and keep the main and fill lights off the background. This is hard to do with umbrellas because they throw light everywhere. Our fill was about 5-7 feet off the subjects position in a direct line away from the background, the main was the same distance on a 45 degree angle (don’t get out your protractor, eye ball it, this is not critical) from the subject. Nice clean, corporate and easy to extract. Go as crazy as you want there is no perfect light set-up for this, the important part is that you background is even and that your subject is not getting green spill bouncing back onto them.
Next week I’ll hit on:
Shooting Tethered: its not magic, just orginization
