Food, Travel, Photography, Critique Nicholas Doyle Food, Travel, Photography, Critique Nicholas Doyle

Photo Archive Critique - Angel's Share - April 22, 2015.

To see where you’re going, it’s often best to look at where you’ve been. Take a look back into the archive with me and we’ll go over some pictures from my past and I’ll give you pointers on how they could be improved - Lean from my mistakes, and you won’t have to make them yourself.

Memories.

That’s who we really are, right?

What would we be without memories?

Apple likes to play up that nostalgia in the Photos app by creating little memory collections. A recent one popped up with these photos of a trip to Angel’s Share that I took on April 22nd, 2015.

It’s pretty likely, given this visit and subsequent munches at Village Yokocho (which I’ll show you in the next post), that I was out with my old partner in debauchery, Sonny Seng, for this occasion. - I just checked, and he and I also did an east village cocktail crawl just a few days prior, on April 14th, 2015. I discovered the images for that were mysteriously absent from Photos, so that’s been corrected, and I’ll share those with you in the future.

Let’s talk about one of the ingredients of a great photography - love for the subject.

I love craft cocktails - they’re often mysterious, complex, and rich with a history and origin story.

My affection began in college when a friend of mind who really enjoyed a tipple lead me down the path and helped me stock up a home bar. We started off with intensely sugary drinks (have you ever had a Rusty Nail? It’s Drambuie and Scotch. Drambuie is SO SWEET. YUCK. I can’t imagine drinking it now. I gag just thinking about it), which unsurprisingly was also how I eased my way into enjoying coffee.

As I got older or just had more experience with both of these flavorful liquids, I began to appreciate the complex flavors beneath all the sugar, so now I tend to like my drinks fairly dry instead of painfully sweet, and I like my coffee pure black - so I can get the essence of the drink and appreciate all the care and attention that when into its production.

I began to appreciate the story and history that get wrapped up in craft cocktails and the storied bottles they come from, and that love and fascination make them a great subject for me - I already care about and understand my subject, and that helps me know what I want to convey with my images, and to anticipate what’s going to happen next, because I’m deeply familiar with this process - again, because I have experience with the subject and with photographing it.

By this point, I’d been taking pictures of food for years, since it was the subject that originally sparked my interest in photography. But it wasn't only recently that I had transitioned to being a professional photographer, and brought along all that intention when it came to making images.

I made the best images I knew how at the time, always pushing myself to the limit of my knowledge and ability. It’s been several years now, and I can look back on this work and be proud of it, but I can also see some areas for improvement, and I’d like to point those out to you for your benefit.

Fire is always a fun subject, given our deep historic connection to it. I’m glad I kept this image dark, preserving the moody feel of the speakeasy. Smokey cocktails were still a rarity at the time, and this was the first time I’d seen someone blowtorch some spices and then invert a glass on it. It was quite the spectacle.

How could this be improved? I think I crushed the highlights a little too much in the edit - I don’t like that the white of the flame is a little dull and grey. Killing the highlights is a pretty common mistake for beginners, and I made it plenty in my early career.

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This photo conveys what’s happening - the finished cocktail being strained into the smoke filled glass - but it’s not as obvious and dramatic as I would like. It’s teaming with grain and noise thanks to me really pumping the ISO on a camera not built for low light performance. If I were taking this picture now, I would really prefer to use a flash behind or to the side of the glass to capture all the smoke. If I couldn’t use the flash, I’d try to put some light source in the room behind the glass by changing my perspective. It’s also a little tight on the composition. These days I like a little more environment and breathing room.

I enjoy a low-key photo, but this feels more dim than it should be. It feels a little dim and muddy, and the sliver of focus on the ice cube and bubbles isn’t really apparent enough, so the image basically looks out of focus. Not a winner all around.

Another shot where the composition is just too tight. It’s focused on the pouring action, so that’s good, but too much of the subject is on the very edge of the frame - both the cup and the shaker. A good rule-of-thumb in photography is to keep your subject away from the very edges of the frame unless you’re going for some intentional disharmony.

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This one’s not bad, but would be improved if there was more separation between the glass and the bottles behind it so that you’d be able to more easily focus on the glass.

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It’s important to work in a little atmosphere, because no bar is just the drinks - a huge aspect of why you visit one place over another is the atmosphere and ambiance. This picture tells the story of the window in the foreground, the pretty flowering tree in the midground, and the background of buildings across the street. You understand it’s the view you’ll see out the window when you’re here. But, the composition could be better. There’s an opportunity to artfully overlay the grid of the foreground window over the windows of the building in the back, and a few minutes spent perfecting that compostion

Here’s a nice little collection of images of a vibrant orange drink. Probably had carrot juice in it (hey, it was a long time ago). All of these suffer from the same problem that plagues the rest of the set - claustrophobic composition. The final image with the copper cup is slightly better in this regard. You could call this the “learning to use a macro lens” phase. The problem is that this distance is kind of in between where a lens like this shines - it should either be closer and really focused on a single tiny element, or further away and just using its long focal length to make a well compressed shot.

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This photo has some nice things going for it - the blurry second drink in the foreground, a somewhat wider composition than the previous images, and a good range of colors. Some people like the diagonal horizon, feeling that it adds action and tension to the image. I don’t. It could work for a stylized image if that’s intentionally what you’re going for, or say, you’re taking a picture of a dirt bike doing a rad launch, but that’s not what I’m after in my imagery. Given my overlap into the discipline of architectural photography, I prefer a more clean, crisp, minimal vibe in my images. So I make sure never to have angled horizons in my imagery these days. But that, of course, is and element of the style I’ve developed, and not necessarily a hard photographic rule.

Hey look, I took this with my iPhone 4! No, I didn’t. I took it with a DSLR, I was just pushing it too hard in the darkness and didn’t even hit the focus. Is it a terrible image? Not necessarily. You can tell what the subject is and you can tell what’s going on, but that’s not good enough for me. I want a more clean and crisp image now, and wouldn’t be satisfied with this. It could be so much better.

This image is fine, but would benefit from a little more space on the top and bottom. So a step or two back would be in order. But also, I probably wouldn’t shoot this image today - I’d instead go for a straight-on, one-point-perspective, again going back to the more architectural imagery approach I’ve adopted.

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Here’s the brightest image in the whole set, and I still like this one. It’s wide enough that you get a sense of place and environment, it tells a story of the man behind the bar, working on preparing this drink, the order for which he’s got just off to the side. You can just see his face at the top of the frame, so you can see a little peek of him without it being distracted. The colors and light could be managed a little better in post, but out of this set this is one of my favorites.

Here’s another favorite from this set. It’s dark and low key, but you can still make a bit of detail in Ben’s face and clothing. It captures the mood and ambience of the speakeasy.

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The only photo in this set where you get a good look at his face. There’s a lot of wasted space at the top of the frame that isn’t really adding anything to the image. It would be better if I’d shot it landscape, so that he could be looking deep into the frame.

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Here’s a fun one where you get to see a smile on his face, as well as the ingredients of the cocktail he’s building in the foreground. I don’t know if they set the bottles out for many of the customers, but he knows how interested I am in what goes into the drink, so he often does this for me. I like all of the elements of this image, but they’re not layered quite as well as they could be - it would be better if there were a clearer view of the cocktail he’s making, since that’s where this whole story is going. This could be accomplished either by my moving to a different vantage point, or by shuffling the bottles around.

Here’s the finished cocktail from the previous shot. I like the angle on the drink here, looking slightly down into the glass and also seeing through it. Light and colors are still a little muddy, as has plagued most of the images in this series, but again, this camera wasn’t built to be a champ in the dark. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to use it well enough back then. There’s a good compositional line here, in that your eye enters the image at the top right and then roams across the bottles and down to the cocktail. And, if your eye enters the frame from anywhere else, it will drift straight to the cocktail thanks to its dominant color. It’s got the guts of a great image and a little refining on structure and light could make it better. It’s also always nice to get rid of or hide those rubber bar things. They’re very practical, but I never like seeing them in photos. But that’s a luxury you’re probably not going to get unless you’re doing an official shoot for them, or unless you’re very persuasive.

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Almost good, but the bright light on the left is the most eye catching thing in the image, and pulls the eye away from the cocktail. You know the cocktail is the focus, and you want to look at it and appreciate it, but that bright light just keeps yanking you away. Be careful about what you let be the brightest object in the image, because that is what the viewer is going to see more than anything else.

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Many a good sipping session ends with a shot shared between the bartender and the patrons. My love affair with rum was picking up, so that’s what we had. I enjoy this pouring shot where some of the glasses are filled but not yet all of them - it gives you a clear sense of what’s happening. Odd numbers are often stronger than even, so I could have tried to compose this so you didn’t see the fourth glass, but that would be slightly dishonest about the real story - that four people were going to be drinking. There’s always a choice to be made between an artistic image and an honest, storytelling image. I also like that you can see the label on the bottle, and I’m sure Bacardi would like that, too. How could the image be improved? That napkin and empty glass on the right aren’t adding anything, so they could be moved for cropped out. And as with every other image here, I could have moved a little further away or use a slightly wider lens for a less cramped composition. And if I were taking this photo today, I would very intentionally line up the glasses in a perfectly straight line.

One thing that comes from experience is a willingness to get more involved in the image. This was fairly early in my career, so I mostly sat back and took the pictures photo journalistically. Also, I was just here having drinks, not on an assignment. But these days, even if I’m just traveling or out having fun, if I see a photo I want, I’m doing to reach out and fiddle with whatever I need to in order to get the photo I want. I build the image I see as I see it in my mind, because that’s how I share my vision of the world with my viewers.

Do this.

I encourage you to take this approach with your own pictures, no matter what skill level you’re at. Look back at pictures from a week ago, a year ago, 5 years ago, and ask yourself what you were doing then, and what you can do better now, and the photos you take today and tomorrow will be better for it.

Props to Ben

Quick shoutout to Ben Rojo for making some of the most fabulous drinks around. When he sees these old pictures of himself he’ll probably respond as many do when looking at old pictures of themselves: “hey, delete those!”

If you read my previous post on the power of repetition and prolific production, then you know the best thing you can do is go out and put some of the stuff you learned here to use. Send me some pictures you took using the lessons you learned from this.

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Travel, Food Nicholas Doyle Travel, Food Nicholas Doyle

Rustic Farmhouse Style at Saraghina

There are few restaurants that really take me back to the Brooklyn of yesteryear, but this place always does. The style is often imitated these days, but as my mother pointed out on a recent visit, this is the genuine article. It really reminds me of why I love this place, along with upstate new york. There's a coziness to it that is just so comforting. It's a great place to go for a slow, drizzly day.

The pasta is pretty, the pizza is better.

Saraghina Restaurant
Italinan / Pizzeria
435 Halsey Street
Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

The Story

Oct. 24th, 2017, Tuesday

My mother and I were roaming around in Williamsburg running errands while Regina was having hear hair put into braids in anticipation of our honeymoon trip to Hawaii. Braids are no-muss, no-fuss, so Regina can collapse in to bed at night and hop out in the morning without having to do any daily maintenance. Very good for traveling. She was having it done in Bed-Stuy, and she was finished around the time we were ready to have lunch. Any time I'm out, I try to find a restaurant in the neighborhood I'm in so I can have excuse to go there without having to travel. But nothing in Williamsburg was really jumping out to me. However, the last time I'd dropped Regina off at the salon to get her hair done, I wandered around the neighborhood and seriously considered having dinner at Saraghina, so much so that I was standing at the door reading the menu. I decided to have my money and go home that time, but the desire to eat there lingered. You know that feeling when you really want something, but don't get it and it's still nipping at you in the back of your mind. Yeah, that's the one. So I had to go.

It was a drizzly day, which felt perfect for this place. It was slow and there were only a few other diners present. So we got a great seat right by the windows, and I was able to get a few photos of the place without having to avoid patrons in the photos.

There's a quick photo tip for you. Want to photograph a restaurant? Go in the middle of a weekday. This was 2pm on a Tuesday. I only had my iPhone 7 on me because I'm trying to be more conscious about not carrying my camera constantly. It's nice to go out in the city and not have a heavy bag with me. But of course I always get into a situation where I wish I had my camera so I could take better photos. This is one such occasion. But still, I'm happy with the results. It's not like the iPhone is bad, per-se. Just not as good. But if you're reading this on your phone and the images are small, then it's not as obvious as it is on a larger display. So, there's that tangent.

I focused on photographing the space right around the windows, to capture the mood of the day and a bit of the design of the the place. I went very minimal on the edits, but now the lack of perfectly straight lines on that one picture of Regina with the windows behind her is making me a little crazy. But I'm not going to change it. It's important to be comfortable with imperfection. I slipped a few photos of Regina's silhouette in because 1. I love her & 2. I've been playing with more silhouette and dark areas in my photos. So a lot of these were a trial in embracing having really dark areas in my images. I shot so many super bright, light filled images for so long that I'm looking to go in a different direction, and these are experiments in that realm, pushing my iPhone to see what it can do.

After the interiors I took a photo of my menu, which reminds me of a book I made in college out of an old pair of pants. I took a bookbinding class that has always stuck with me. Hand made books always catch my eye and I have to pick them up and inspect how they're put together, which is exactly what happened with this menu. The denim cover is really what too me back to my pants book, which I believe my mother still has on her mantle. I don't make books much anymore, but I still seeing handmade ones, so this was exciting for me. The stamped logo is really nice, too.

The drink was a special that day. Spiced, Spiced Cider. It was fantastic, comforting, a great herald of fall. Regina and I were flying to Hawaii the next day, but we both really love fall, so it was good to get a potent taste of it right before we left.

Finally, the pasta. I don't eat much pasta, so it's a great treat when I do have it. So I was very excited to order this Tagliatelle al Ragu. It's the dish I was eyeing that other day when I was outside looking at the menu. It was good, but the pizza Regina ordered blew it out of the water.

Sorry, no pizza photos, because I've gotten over the hump of making my fellow diners wait while I photograph their food. No reason they should suffer for my craft. If I'm going to take food photos it will be of my own dish, and I try to get my shot as fast as possible so I can enjoy my food at its peak, too. Somethings, though, I get caught up in the moment and keep snapping. But that's how I know I still love doing this, so I'm never going to chase that feeling away.

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