Junglefrog Cooking » Photography

New toy(s) to play with and a lovely visit..

Simone (junglefrog) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:48:40 +0000

Dreaming the day away...

Every once in a while you have to give yourself something new and exciting to play with and in fact I got two new toys today. But then you know I have no self control to speak of so that must be the reason… I was meeting Julia and Dan for lunch today in Amsterdam. Julia (Always leave room for Dessert) and Dan are from Canada and I met Julia almost a year ago now during the fabulous Plate to Page workshop. I heard they were coming to Amsterdam for a couple of days so I pursueded them to have lunch with me at restaurant De Kas.

Julia and Dan (look in the window!)

Julia is a fun and lovely lady and I was excited to meet her again and meet Dan as a bonus. De lunch was lovely and in fact we had so much fun that we sort of didn’t notice that the restaurant was already closed… They are too polite to send people away apparently and we lost track of time. Anyway, Julia had this fun new toy on her camera, called a lensbaby. I’ve been wanting to get myself one of those for a pretty long time, but either forgot or had other stuff to buy and I had already planned on going to the camera store and get myself a 50mm 1.4 this afternoon. But then, here comes Julia with the lensbaby and I was sold. Just love the little thing and it is so much fun to play around with.

Gizmo thinks it is so not interesting!

I already have the 50 mm 1.8 which is a fantastic little lens for the cost involved but the 1.4 is sharper at full opening and well, I can always use a little extra light. We will be going on a fun little visit to Brugge with our Belgian friends soon and this is the only lens I will bring (plus the lensbaby to play around with!) Love to travel light!

Gotta love the special effect of the lensbaby!

So this post was all about making you jealous of my new toys and the fact that I got to meet the fabulous Julia and Dan for a fantastic lunch and I’ll leave you with one last shot of Gizmo taken with the new 1.4.

Do I see a bird over there moving in the bushes?

Behind the scenes at a sweet photoshoot

Simone (junglefrog) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:00:31 +0000

I know I always keep blabbing to you about photoshoots and how that works but I thought for a change to give you a small behind the scenes look at one of the shoots we did this week. In a lot of cases I cannot share the photos with you as it’s for a publication or a customer who doesn’t want the photos to be strewn all over the internet, but this time the photos were for stock and therefore I can share with you whatever I want….

Cupcakes all over

The idea for the shoot was to give the feeling of a girly (kids) birthday party with lots of pink, lots of cupcakes and lots of other sweet treats. We had planned the shoot for a while now and we is Femke (and Eddy in the morning) from sfeercatering Heeerlijk. As guest helpers we had Pauline from Uit eigen streek en Vivian Hulsebosch so it was full house. I think Eddy escaped the girly atmosphere after making us lunch…

I’ve met both Femke and Pauline on twitter and when Femke and I had the first photoshoot together, we got on really well so I’m sure there will be lots more joined ventures in the future. Now a photo shoot like this requires some planning as we wanted to have lots of treats, so I made caramel apples (recipe below), Pauline baked some cake layers and made butter cream and Femke provided the cupcakes, most of the accessories and the other treats.

Table top view of party table!

Styling a large table and making it look fairly natural is not really simple and without a stylist present it posed some challenges. I think we did a lot of different takes before we arrived at the final shot which is above. I’m sure there could be some improvements to this but hey, I like it….!

The table from a different angle

With these kinds of setups I like to work with daylight. Even though I have all the lights in the studio I might ever need, I still strongly prefer natural light. And I have a corner in the studio that is perfect as it has side light and backlight and no direct sunlight so in most cases that corner is my perfect spot for shoots like this. From the right I need a fill still to lift some of the shadows as this shoot was all about light and fun and almost summery feeling.

Table setup with reflector

We usually start with one element and add pieces to it. Because I was shooting from above I had to climb on the ladder everytime to check the setting. Obviously you can also work on the floor and in a lot of cases that is easier except that you have to have a background you want on the floor and since we wanted to use the table that was not an option in this case. I have to collect some larger backgrounds that I can use on the floor. Your light will change if you do that so you have to be aware of the direction of the light.

The team ready to dive in!

Because we had so much stuff we did table settings but also closeups and details on some of the cakes, cupcakes with both the table, another older and darker wooden board and my little white garden table (which is the first shot you see)

Caramel apples

Overall I think we were all pretty happy with the end results of the shoot and we’re already planning the next one! (which is gonna be outdoors and awesome, I’m sure!) Now for the recipe of the caramel apples; there are a lot of different recipes out there and this one is the more simpler one. The trick is to get the caramel right as I found out myself, since the first time went very wrong and the second one could definitely have been better too. I might try a couple more caramel recipes which I will share too.

And I was there too!

Caramel apples

Print recipe

Serves	6-8
Cook time	15 minutes
Meal type	Dessert, Snack
Misc	Child Friendly, Pre-preparable

Ingredients

500g sugar
4 tablespoons water

Directions


I guess the recipe is so simple that you can hardly call it a recipe but with caramel it's all in the execution and not so much in the ingredients. Now when making a large batch such as this it becomes critical that you keep a close eye on your saucepan with the sugar in it. What will happen if you have a lot of sugar is the bottom will caramelize and the top will still be solid sugar. In order to avoid this you will need to stir a tiny bit. Stirring too much will results in crystallized and hard sugar (as I found out in try number one) and not stirring will result in half burned and half raw caramel.

Put the sugar on a very low heat giving it the change to start the process slowly. Make sure you use heat proof tools as the sugar becomes very very hot. Make sure you have a bowl of cold water nearby to cool of the caramel once done as it will otherwise keep on cooking and get too far. As soon as the sugar starts to caramelize, very slowly move it a bit around with a spatula (heatresistant one!) and make sure it browns evenly. You can choose to add the water or not. I added water in the first try and did not add it for the second. I think without works maybe a little better but I have yet to give it another go.

As soon as all the sugar is lovely and brown and you can smell that it is the right color. (you can really smell if it is done or not!) cool the pan quickly in your waterbath and then dip your apples in the caramel one by one. Put them on a sheet of baking paper and make sure you do not get in touch with the caramel yourself!

Spiced nutty apple-pear cake

Simone (junglefrog) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:00:51 +0000

Pretty bundt cake

I made this pretty moist and delicious bundt cake this afternoon. It came out of the oven around 4.30 pm, then had to cool and by the time I wanted to take a photo there was no light left whatsoever. That meant having to wait either until the next day or find an alternative solution. I still had this one daylight lamp that I took out of the studio at some point, used once, didn’t like it and tossed it in a corner to get dusty. Enough with the lazy and comfortable daylight! Time to get cracking on some serious stuff..

I’ve received many a question from people desperate to find out how to work with lighting in the night or for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, in the wintertime when light fades after 3 pm. I’ve written something about it before which you find here but thought I could do a little more research myself so why not share? As I said; I never use this lamp as it’s just not the same but in case of emergency, you would have to do with what you got right? So for today I dusted of my daylight lamp, took it into our kitchen and started moving it around.

Position of the lamp

As you can see I positioned the light to come from the right and back and from above a little bit. The lamp has 5 separate bulbs I can turn off individually, so I turned three of and left two burning as it was far too bright, causing burnout and heavy shadows. With a little less light it started to look a little better. I had only one light, so you can see that there is quite a bit of shadow in front of the cake. In order to fill that up a bit I used a silver reflector (you can also use foamboard, aluminiumfoil or something similar) to bounce a bit of light back to the front of the cake. In the two photos below you can see the difference with or without the reflector.

With or without reflector

You can tell that there is a big difference here. You can still tell that these are shot with artificial light but the result is acceptable and you can actually use this. Now what is most important I find when working with lights is the direction of the light. That is also true for daylight but that can be a bit more forgiving. I’ve taken two shots where I changed the position of the lamp and see what happens.

Ok first of all; what I like, might be something else from what you like, so it’s in the end all personal preference but to me the photo on the right is boring and lacks something. I turned the light more towards the table coming more from straight above almost (not quite) which made the light a bit flatter and shadows less pronounced.

I will be doing more tests with other lights that anyone would have in their home. Just to see what the issues are and how to possible solve those (or not). These lights are the easy ones since they are daylight balanced and need limited tweaking when it comes to color. In general for shooting at night, it is extremely helpful to use raw instead of jpeg. It gives you more control over the white balance so you can correct it later where needed. For now I will leave you with this delicious bundt cake!

Apple pear and nut bundt cake

Print recipe

Serves	8-12
Prep time	15 minutes
Cook time	1 hour
Total time	1 hour, 15 minutes
Allergy	Egg, Peanuts, Tree Nuts
Meal type	Dessert
Misc	Pre-preparable
Website	Epicurious

Ingredients

1/2 cup dried cranberries
2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg (freshly grated)
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup light brown sugar (packed)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks, softened)
3 eggs (large ones)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pears (peeled, cored and cut into small pieces)
2 apple, Golden Delicious (peeled, cored and cut into small pieces)
1 cup Mixed nuts (coarsely chopped)
1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions


In a small bowl put the cranberries with a bit of warm water and let them soak for at least an hour. Drain, discarding the water and set aside. Position rack in the middle of an oven and preheat the oven to 180 C. Lightly butter the bundt tin, then dust with flour, knocking out the excess.

In a large mixing bow or bowl of electric mixer, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and salt. Add brown and granulated sugars, butter, eggs and vanilla. Using electric mixer, beat on high speed, scraping down sides of bowl with rubber spatula as needed, until batter is pale and smooth, about 3 minutes for handheld mixer and 2 minutes for standmixer. Stir in apples, pears, nuts and cranberries. Spoon into prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake until a wooden pick or skewer comes out clean when inserted into the center of the cake. About 1 hour. Cool cake in pan on a rack for 10 minutes, then invert and unmold onto rack and cool completely. Cake can be made up to three days in advance and stored at room temperature wrapped tightly in plastic wrapp

Quick update

Simone (junglefrog) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:26:52 +0000

You didn’t think I had vanished from the face of the earth now did you? I’ve just been incredibly swamped with work ever since the new Year started. It’s weird, wonderful and a little troubling too. (knock on wood) It could be over next month, so I am taking everything I can to make up for possibly leaner times coming soon. The funny thing is too that I spend more time working in the studio then ever before… It must be a sign of some sort.

Cress

I thought I entertain you with a couple of shots from recent shoots I did. I’m getting more and more food assignments which is good news as that – ultimately – is what I want to do. Next week is again going to be really busy with on monday a shoot with a man who tries to get schoolkids to eat healthier by educating them about growing their own in small city garden, on Tuesday I am in the studio together with a food stylist shooting for a producer of a sustainable substitute for tuna, on Wednesday product shots, on Thursday I have the second day of shoots for a restaurant in Arnhem where we will do the desserts and a la carte menu and on Friday I am giving a workshop.. And that’s the week over again. Well except for the portrait shoots on Saturday..

Small cherry pie

And because Tom is still unemployed he has been doing most of the cooking so not a lot of recipes to share. I miss actually coming up with new recipes and even though we have eaten really well and delicious, because of the terrible light at night I haven’t shot any of them. But there will be recipes soon again!

In the meantime we’re also shopping around for a new kitchen, which is fun and frustrating at the same time. We are going to make the kitchen a bit bigger and according to all the sales guys we have a really big kitchen. We don’t think so, as a kitchen can never be too big right?

Possible colorsetting of new kitchen

I can’t give you the exact details of the kitchen but the color setting will be fairly similar to the one above. The wall will be light and the flour will be wooden but the cupboards will be fairly similar and the counter will be slightly less dark (but still stone). It’s a lot of work figuring out all the details while still trying to stay within budget and convincing the salesguys that we do NOT want to spend any more… O well, within the next two weeks, we will probably make the final decision so I’ll let you know once I have the details! And then you think you’re done you still have to figure out what to put on the wall and the floors… *sigh* But it’s all for the greater good!

So no recipe from me this time but there will be one next time!

Lemon Sour Cake – Donna Hay challenge #2

Simone (junglefrog) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:00:43 +0000

Lemon sour bundt cake

There are those things that you can almost predict will go wrong. As I had told you when announcing the Donna Hay Challenge nr. 2, I didn’t have time to make the challenge recipe prior to the actual challenge so I had to do it still, just like the rest of you and then shoot it.

Making the batter was a breeze, but I tried out a new anti-stick stuff that I had used before successfully on other cake tins. I normally grease a bundt cake with butter and then carefully make sure all hooks are filled. I then dust the inside with icing sugar and it works every time. This time I decided to try my anti stick bottle and well… it didn’t work so well as my own method!

First of all I made a big mistake by taking the cake out of the tin just 2 minutes after coming out of the oven. I should have waited longer but I didn’t think, plopped a cakerack on top, turned it over and voila, cake in two! Damn… Not a good thing if you have to smoothly cover the thing in icing and shoot it. So what to do? I carefully took out the part of the cake that was still in the tin and then matched it to the other part already on the cooling rack. Needless to say, that was not perfect but it looked more or less like an entire bundt cake. Then I figured; if I cover it with icing you won’t see it so much now would you?

Ofcourse in order to be able to cover cracks the size of ravines you would need to sort of put a lot of icing on top!

Little more light from the left too

And putting a lot of icing on the cake made it look a little bit dodgy too as you can see in the background. O well, I’m sure it will taste delicious! So now on to the photo part. I normally shoot in my kitchen but since the photo needed to be fairly dark and the sun had all of a sudden decided to come out, I moved everything to the other part of the living room and used a wooden board as my background (LOVE that board which is 200 years old and comes from Weimar!). I placed another dark wooden board behind it on a chair to act as my background. I took a photo with my Iphone to show you the setup.

Setup for the shot

I took two shots; one without the foamboard on the left as you see it above and one with the board. Both photos are shown above. Now in my memory the background of the original photo was quite dark, but when I put the photos on my computer it wasn’t as dark as I had thought it would be. So my photo is darker! If you need areas of a picture to be really dark with heavy shadows, the easiest way to do that is to use something called a ‘flag’. I use white board a lot to reflect the light back onto the photos, with black you basically do the same but in reverse. So where ever you have too much light and you need more shadows, see what happens when you hold a black flag to that area. I took another Iphone photo showing

See what that reflector does from the right?

you how I position the flag, but it was a little hard to hold it at the right angle and hold the black flag at the same time, so it’s not exactly how it should be but you get the picture I think.

See how much shadow it casts? The photos where shot with my Canon eos 5d mark II on manual. The lens was the 100mm macro and the setting were iso 160 at F4.5 for 1/5 s. It was dark and overcast at the time I took the photo which worked fine here as too much light would have made it too bright.

In the photo below you can see how damaged the cake was… All the brown bits are sort of missing plus I think I should have left it maybe a few minutes more. O well, better next time I would say! Also visible here is how the shot looks without using any flag or reflection. The only big difference is that the sun was still out so it looks a little brighter in general plus the curtain on the other end of the room (the kitchen) was open too getting in some stray light from the left.

Before icing!

Side by side for easy comparison

What is also pretty obvious if you compare the two photos side by side is that the bundt pan makes some different to the amount of shadows cast as well. The ridges in the cake by Con Poulos are much more pronounced meaning they cast more shadow then my pale shallow one.. Plus my drips are not so pretty! I should have made my icing a little thinner too. But overall… I’m fairly happy with the results. Good exercise for sure! (both in terms of baking and in terms of taking the shot.. ) Can I hire a cakebaker for next time? Lol.. O wait, next time is not a cake! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! O and can I just say that this cake is absolutely and totally delicious? The addition of sour cream in the batter made it more moist and the overall presence of the lemon is just delicious. It did not last long!

I might actually try and redo this cake if I have enough time left… See if I can make one that is a little bit better looking!

Sour lemon cake

Print recipe

Serves	8-10
Prep time	15 minutes
Cook time	45 minutes
Total time	1 hour
Meal type	Dessert
By author	Donna Hay

Ingredients

220g butter (melted)
2 eggs
330g caster sugar (superfine)
120g sour cream
60ml lemon juice
2 tablespoons lemon rind (finely grated)
300g all purpose flour (sifted)
2 teaspoons baking powder (sifted)

Lemon icing

320g icing sugar (sifted)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons water (boiling)

Directions


Preheat oven to 160 C (320F). Place the butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, lemon juice and rind in a bowl and whisk to combine. Add the flour and baking powder and whisk until smooth. Spoon into 2 x well greased 4 cup capacity (1 liter) Bundt tins and bake for 40-45 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Cool in tins for 10 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the lemon icing, place icing sugar, juice and water in a bowl and mix to combine. Spoon over cakes to serve. Serves 8-10

Junglefrog Cooking » Photography

New toy(s) to play with and a lovely visit..

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Quick update

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