Taking Quality Pizza Photos

[Pizza_Not_War]

Bagel looks great with both backgrounds - pure white & the original not so white.

More importantly, what is the recipe? Did you use the traditional old school water boil method or just an oven bake?


Getting hungry.


PNW

[mmarston]

A bit of Photoshop for you

[Bill/SFNM]

More importantly, what is the recipe? Did you use the traditional old school water boil method or just an oven bake?

Recipe:

Hi-gluten flour: 100%
Water: 52%
Starter: 5% of total dough weight
Sugar: 5%
Maple sugar: 20%
Salt: 1.5%

The interesting thing about this recipe was the use of maple sugar rather than barley malt syrup. I liked it so much I think I'll try maple sugar instead of the plain sugar also. These bagels are boiled before baking. The boiling water also had some maple sugar to enhance the shine (which I knocked down a bit with the polarizer).

[Bill/SFNM]

A bit of Photoshop for you

Nice, mmarston. I'll just email you the RAW files from now on so you can show me how badly I suck at Photoshop. You have seen this, I hope. Hilarious, espcecially episode 10.

Bill/SFNM

[mmarston]

That is hilarious! I had not seen that before. Much better than Photoshop TV.

[November]

Did someone say Photoshop?

http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/tongariki_navel%20%20of%20the%20earth.jpg

[Bill/SFNM]

Hey! hey! hey!!! That's my bagel you used to vastly improve that photo, although I would have replaced all the rocks with bagels. 

[November]

Hey! hey! hey!!! That's my bagel you used to vastly improve that photo, although I would have replaced all the rocks with bagels. 

Wow, I sure hope you mean the five foreground character rocks, because replacing the thousands of rocks in the image would take a major effort.

[Pizza_Not_War]

Hi-gluten flour: 100%
Water: 52%
Starter: 5% of total dough weight
Sugar: 5%
Maple sugar: 20%
Salt: 1.5%

Bill,

Thanks for the recipe. I am however assuming a typo on the Maple sugar. Is it 2% and any reason you could not substitute Maple syrup? Also does the maple flavor come through?

PNW

[Bill/SFNM]

No idea why I messed up the formula. I think I got a phone call in the middle. I even left out an ingredient. It should be:

Hi-gluten flour: 100%
Water: 52%
Starter: 5% of total dough weight
Sugar: 5%
Maple sugar: 4.8%
Dry milk: 4.8%
Salt: 1.5%

No reason why you couldn't use maple syrup - just have to adjust the hydration some. You would never have been able to the very interesting sweetness as coming from maple. I want to crank it up a bit next time to see what happens.

 

[canadianbacon]

The white looks snow-white to me Bill.

Great image, I can really see the texture of the bagel.

P.S. - do you have a nice coffee and some cream cheese to go with that ? 

I re-calibrated my monitor. The background is supposed to be pure white. Is it on your monitors?

[Bill/SFNM]

I just got some new lighting gear, umbrellas, etc. and found myself in need of a pizza to try out different lighting arrangements. No pizza (they last about 30 seconds around here), so I was using a frisbee (courtesy of my dog) as a stand-in. Then the thought occurred to me: why not a fake pizza? I've seen all kinds of plastic food replicas in the windows of Japanese eateries. Surely there must be inexpensive plastic replica pizzas. Well I did find one for $20 that didn't look any better than my dog's frisbee. No, I take that back; the frisbee was more realistic. But to get anything even semi-realistic is over $80, some even close to $200!!!!! Not what I had in mind.

I made an extra pizza today and stuck it in the freezer to be used whenever I need a stand-in. The dog wants his frisbee back.

Bill/SFNM

[November]

Bill,

I don't suppose you're good with sculpting or clay modeling?  There are a whole host of do-it-yourself possibilities.

http://www.amaco.com/prodcat-modeling-clays-69.html

Red, yellow, white and some blending is all you need for a basic pizza (http://www.amaco.com/prod-super-dough-342.html).

- red.november

[Bill/SFNM]

I don't suppose you're good with sculpting or clay modeling? 

red.november,

I should probably stick to frozen pie models. My clay sculpting skills probably haven't improved since my last attempt in kindergarten.

Bill/SFNM

[Pete-zza]

Looking at Bill/SFNM's beautifully prepared and photographed pizzas has made me wonder whether he is using some of the techniques ("tricks") described and shown at the following websites: http://photocritic.org/food-photo-tricks/ and http://www.thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm.

The above links came from a recent thread at the PMQ Think Tank at http://thinktank.pmq.com/viewtopic.php?t=6247&sid=671edb0fa894afec203ed9269ddf4cd0. A related PMQTT thread is http://thinktank.pmq.com/viewtopic.php?t=6234.

Now I can see why my Papa John clone pizzas didn't look like the ones I saw at the Papa John's website .

Peter

[Bill/SFNM]

Looking at Bill/SFNM's beautifully prepared and photographed pizzas has made me wonder whether he is using some of the techniques ("tricks") described and shown at the following websites: http://photocritic.org/food-photo-tricks/ and http://www.thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm.

Peter,

Thank you for the kind words. I haven't gotten to the point of using any tricks. Still just trying to learn basic lighting and composition skills. Eventually I will turn my attention to more advanced techniques for making the food look as appetizing as possible. That's a long way off.

Bill/SFNM