New Year's Eve 2005 was a Saturday and my pal Rami and I had arranged for me to head over early to the Golden Pita and take some photographs for their new web site. The Golden is my favorite restaurant, my usual Saturday haunt, and Rami is the son of Salma and Roy, who have been running the place as a family business for something like eight years now. Salma and Roy also have a couple of daughters who help with the business, and another son, and together with Rami they are some of the nicest people you could ever meet. They also make really good food.

So I arrived early, a little before they opened, and started with some photos of the food cooler where they make most of their sandwiches. Here's a shot from the customer side.

And here's one from the other side, with a big greek salad and two sandwiches in progress. They look like falafel sandwiches to me. The falafel at the Golden Pita is excellent.

As you can see, the GP is a cozy place, with seating for about 24 inside, and six or so more outside.

After taking the cooler shots, I brought in my equipment, including my new lights, some reflectors, and a laptop for checking the photos. The main task for the day was not interior shots, but rather shots of some of the food that they make there. I'd never even done product photography before, and here I was starting out with food. Food can supposedly be a very finicky photographic subject.

I was looking forward to the challenge, though, and I knew my clients were friendly.

Rami brought out a nice piece of maroon fabric for use as a backdrop, and then brought the first bit of food. It was a spinach pie with greek salad and tzatziki.

This turned out to be one of the toughest shots to get right. I had opted, on the advice of my friend Karla, to use a single flash on the subject, and a reflector to fill in light on the side opposite the flash. I put a softbox on the flash, which is on the left, so the highlights would be spread out. This is what gives the nice highlight on the olive. On the right, I placed a piece of white foamboard, so the flash would bounce off of the board and light up the right-facing parts (another great suggestion from Karla). The reflector is why you can see the spinach on the left half of the pie; without the reflector, that whole area was black. The tricky part of the setup was getting the right amount of fill, which involved moving the flash, reflector, and food around until I was able to get enough light to see the texture of the spinach on both sides of the pie. Even then I had to resort to Photoshop to brighten it a little.

The spinach pie had taken about half an hour of shooting and fiddling to get right. But after that I had most of the settings I needed figured out, and the shots went quicker.

The next food to come out was a plate of tabouleh (parsley salad). It's a very healthy salad, but if you use a normal flash on it it can look more oily than it really is. So I was happy to have the softbox on my flash, which diffused the highlights and kept it from looking too shiny.

I love the tabouleh at the GP; I could easily eat six or seven plates of it. Maybe I'll try that some day.

Things were going well with the photography now, and the next plate to arrive was stuffed grape leaves with tomato, pickled turnip, and tzatziki. I'm not really a fan of pickled turnip, although I have occasionally dropped a piece or two of it in my colleagues' coat pockets when they weren't looking. I'd never do that with the tomato or grape leaves, though—those are too precious to put anywhere but my mouth.

Now, even though I don't like pickled turnips, I'm told by those who do that the ones at The Golden are pretty good. I'm not surprised; they do their own pickling.

The next food out was a chicken plate. This was on a bigger plate than the last few items, and necessitated moving the camera back, but otherwise it was the same basic setup.

For a few years, I would have lunch at the Golden Pita pretty much every weekday. Most of the time, I would get a plate like this, where the chicken was replaced with whatever the special of the day was. Now I work in Surrey and the Golden Pita is no longer on my way to work, so I don't get a good, solid, healthy lunch like this that often.

And after a nice healthy lunch like that, what could go better than filo pastry, pistachios, and honey? That's right, next up is baklava, Lebanese style. Amazingly good stuff that I can't have, now that I'm diabetic.

This platter was quite a bit larger than the plate, and so I had to move the camera, change camera angle, and fiddle a little with light placement to get it right. Even so, I was able to get a good photo fairly quickly. Which is a good thing, because I was staring at a huge mound of temptation!

And here's another platter, with Lebanese coffee and a dessert plate.

This was another fun photo to do. The first problem was that the coffee and dessert was too small for the platter; it didn't fill the platter up. The items looked lonely and far apart on it. So I rearranged them to all be towards the front of the platter, with a big open space behind. Then I lowered the camera to present a more oblique angle and that foreshortened the empty part and hid it behind the coffee. The other thing that I was careful with here is the exact placement of highlights (I had to move the light a little).

I also should have ensured that there were no discernable reflections of things not in the scene. For example, if you would see a reflection of the camera or of me in the coffee pot, it wouldn't look right. It turned out that there weren't any recognizable reflections, but that was just luck. Next time I'm shooting something shiny, I'll check and make sure.

That was it for the photography; after taking photos of all of that good food I was hungry. Salma and Roy did a great job of fixing that up, though, giving me the first of several free meals that I got for taking these photos. I was planning on doing the photos for free, because they're friends and I enjoyed the challenge, but they insisted. And who am I to refuse such good food?

Back at home, I cleaned up the photos, removing little imperfections from the cloth and once or twice adjusting light levels slightly. I produced two versions of each photo: one with the normal (dark) background, and one with a lightened background. I wasn't sure which one they'd prefer. Here's the light-background version of that last photo.

After fixing them up, I sent the photos all along to my friend Kent, another loyal Golden Pita customer who was constructing the web site. You can see the results at http://www.goldenpita.ca/ . (Click on the little word "enter" on that page...you'll find my photos hanging around in various places inside.)

It had been a fun and very tasty way to end the year. I left The Golden wondering what new tastes and photographic adventures awaited me in 2006.

Takin' a cup o' kindness,
Tom