A Prawn Star Is Born...

Kitty Prawn

Photographing food is a painstaking and mind-bending exercise. You can only stare at a dead fish for so long before your vision and concentration begin to waver. Dead fish might not be able to talk but they can sure vibe you out in a fairly sinister way.


We've always approached food photography with a brave smile and a hopeful heart. In Greece we are surrounded and bombarded by some the most dreadful images of food on the planet. Restaurant menu boards seem to have all been photographed and designed by a violent 4 year old. It's not easy to make a schnitzel look like anything other than a dried up old shoe, but surely to all the gods, there must be a better way than that? Over-saturated omelettes swimming in lakes of grease? Wrinkled steaks buried beneath a mountain of flacid chips? Chicken curries sitting in puddles of their own vomit? We got 'em outside every reastuarnt in every town and resort. A menu board should entice someone inside a particular establishment and not send them screaming down the street in horror.

Most restauranters seem content to maintain the status quo. To be honest, the seasonal tourist traps have little incentive to either change or adapt. The walk-in trade from cruise ships and coach parties is still relatively reliable. The only advertising that needs to be done is to send a member of staff out onto the street to shout louder than the next guy with a menu in one hand and a parrot in the other. But the underlying attitude is one of laziness and duplicity. One particular owner in Rhodes Old Town managed to sum up this attitude with admirable honesty. We were discussing the idea of maybe photographing his speciality dishes in order to brighten up his menu board outside. His chef could possibly prepare several succulent dishes and we could photograph them freshly popping and piping hot from the kitchen? But the notion that a simple menu board could also be a work of art was flat-lining.

"Why would you want to photograph my food?" said the owner. "My food here is shit!"

Buy fresh. Cook fresh. Photograph fresh.

In order to photograph food you need to care about food itself. The vegetable and seafood markets in Greece are both cheap and vibrant. Vegetables are covered in mud because they have just been dug out of the ground by a man who will also give you free shots of souma and red wine. Shellfish are practically sizzling with sea salt and technicolour. Quite how this amazing array of locally-grown produce is mulched, trampled and generally destroyed in the name of commerce is an unbelievable attrocity. So when the good folks at iTQi approached us to submit an image for their photography award, we practically clawed out their eyeballs.

Like any photographers we went back to the menu board and decided just what we wanted to eat that night. We wanted to eat prawns. So we went to the fish shop and bought four, rainbow-tailed prawns from Egypt. Food photography is best described as a stage production. There is only room for one hero on the plate. Once you have established the hero then there is only limited space for the little people who like to think that one day they might possibly become the hero. Like garnish. Or salad. Or bread. Yuk. The star of the show - like Helen Mirren, Nick Cave or Christopher Walken - will always be the centre of attention. In this particular instance we are only concerned with a rainbow-tailed prawn from Egypt. We called him/her Kitty.

Fresh tsipoura on ice.

So you might think that, in this golden age of instant techno-gratification, absolutely anybody can photograph a prawn called Kitty on a mobile phone. You'd be right. But if it's worth doing at all then it's worth doing properly. So the first thing we did was stick Kitty in a white Lastolite light tent. On a white plate. Test shot. Too, err, white. Very white. Kitty had all but disappeared. So we powered up the lights and slowed down the shutter to compensate. Kitty began to emerge. Everything, however, was still just too flat.

It was Karen who suggested placing Kitty on a mirror. All of a sudden it began to pop. Even though Kitty is undeniably dead, I love her expression. The two Bowens strobes at either side and an overhead Speedlight have highlighted the translucence that disappeared after we fried Kitty up in a wok with spring onions and ginger. I love her alien skeleton and the amazing colours of her tail. Personally I think the mirror added a third dimension to the photograph. We wouldn't want to meet Kitty Prawn on a dark night but, goddamn, she tasted good!

So food photography is a skewed and strange distraction. You need to book the hero and arrange the supporting cast just like a Hollywood fiend. Be ruthless. Less is more. What's the motive? That'll be food, young gun, because we all need to eat.

Below we have outlined our 10 commandments as far as food photography is concerned:

1: Never argue with proper chefs. Life's too short. The best chefs are all psychotic and the worst are just plain rude.

2: There's a big difference between a chef and a cook.

3: Buy fresh. Cook fresh. Photograph fresh. Don't leave stuff wilting around in the kitchen whilst you pop out for a pint or something.

4: Never ever, ever, ever use a camera's pop-up auto flash. It makes everyone and everything look rubbish. In fact disable the stupid thing right now with a big hammer.

5: Keep the camera lower than you might instinctively think. See the plate as a six year old. It makes small food look bigger.

6: Never photograph food in direct sunlight. The shadows are too harsh and the food will look flat.

7: Don't clutter. Over-propping the image creates a mess and everybody forgets who the hero is supposed to be. If in doubt, just watch Waterworld!

8: Eat everything you photograph. You don't know where the next meal is coming from.

9: Take a step back from the final image. Have a glass of wine. Look at it again. Ask yourself - would I want to eat that thing? What is it? Yuk!

10: Q - How many food stylists does it take to change a lightbulb?

     A  - None. AND DON'T MOVE THE BLOODY LIGHTBULB!