Salami Platter

This is going to be my last post before I go away for 2 weeks to Japan. Yeah I’m planning to take lots of food photo there but that’s latter.   This time it is about salami. I am thinking of creating a salami platter. One of the tricks that I learned about shooting meat slices is that to fold the slices  so that it has some form and height  (instead of just lying dead flat on the plate).    So there you go, I send my wife off to a salami discovery mission. She knows of a place in a little suburb called Summer Hills called Il Villagio that sells really good salami. I mean you can get “OK” salami easily but this one is delicacy. She brought home three different types of salami for me to experiment on. Boy she knows what I want.   Then I start folding the slices. They are quite delicate to handle because some of the slices are so thin that it “collapse” when you fold it and becomes flat. Not a good shape for shooting. I mostly fold the slices into half so it resemble a semi circle shape. But once I did that for all the slices and try to arrange them on the board, I found them to be a bit boring. I want to make something different – something that “pops”. What else can I do with the slice of meat? Ideas: cut in half, put the folded slices on top of each other and punch a tooth pick through them so they can stay in shape, roll them into a cylinder, etc. The “rolling” seems like a good idea at that time so I went for it.   I also planned to arrange to rolled slices into some unusual arrangement. But it proof to be more difficult than I thought. The rolled slices flattened when I put other rolled slices on top of each other, simply because they are too thin. You know what? Let’s stick a small dried olive inside each of the roll. Viola, the rolled slices become as solid as a wood log. Another trick I that I picked up along the way.  

Salami Platter

All I need now is some props. I just use what I had at hand, bit of olive, crackers and cheese cubes.   Lighting This time I put the soft light at 10 o’clock direction and really low. Almost at the subject level. You can see the highlight it created on the left group of salami. I also want to light up the red bit of the olive a bit, like I did in my olive post. Mirror to fill light from the top, another mirror on the 4 o’clock and 2 o’clock to fill in shadow. The 2 o’clock mirror is useful to brighten the rolled salami and bring it to life.   Camera Setting I use my 100mm macro this time at F4 1/20 ISO100. As you can see the camera angle are pretty low, to bring the arrangement of hte rolled salami slices out more. I set to focus on one of the surface of the standing rolled salami and leave everything else out of focus.   Opinion Now some people might find this kind of arrangement really unusual. I mean, traditionally, salami platter is set on some wooden board, serve with bread and wine etc. They are folded or laid flat on the board – ie they are never arranged in the way I did above. Well, I leave it up to you to judge – feed backs are always welcome! I do agree though I probably should have some bread in the shot. Well, I just need toanother excuse to go to Il Villagio…

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