Quick iPhone snap of some dedicated followers © Roger Overall 2012

One of the essential skills a documentary photographer has to hone is their ability to blend in. Once you become accepted in your environment, it becomes easier to take great photographs.

That can be easier said than done. Often, it takes a while before the people we are photographing become at ease in our presence. Yet we don’t always get that time. Documentary wedding photographers, for instance, have to get into the swing of things quickly. The same often goes for documentary photographers working in a commercial environment – an office, for instance. So how to do it?

Attitude

I think attitude plays a big role. My own tactic is to be the opposite of unobtrusive for the first few minutes. I let people know that I am there, either by engaging in a quick conversation or by letting them see me. After a few minutes, I become part of the furniture and I can then apply all the things I’ve learned that make me inconspicuous.

Now, I should add that that only works if the people involved know that you are supposed to be there. A wedding is a very easy environment to work in. After several hundred weddings, I have yet to be asked what I think I am doing taking photographs. The same goes for my corporate assignments. That said, I make sure the client tells their staff I’m going to be on site. I learned the hard way that you can’t assume they will. An incident with a locked gate and a very surprised site manager springs to mind. Not to mention a crazy horse – but that’s a story for another day.

It doesn’t always work

Sometimes, you just can’t blend in, no matter how hard you try. I remember arriving at a Guyana-Suriname jungle border post on assignment a few years ago. I waited in line until it was my turn to show my passport. Even before the officer had opened it, he said: “Welcome to Suriname, Mr Overall.” I knew they were expecting me (my client had arranged for me to enter the country without a visa – another long story), but how did he know it was me before he’d opened the passport?

I didn’t occur to me until much later that I was the only white face in line.

And today on assignment, I couldn’t shake off the locals at all. Just have a listen:

There are, of course, followers you really do want. Like subscribers. You definitely want those. Every blogger does. For instance, if you’d like to subscribe to this blog and receive automatic updates when new content goes live, either in your rss reader or by email, you can click on the relevant icon in the top right-hand corner under ‘Get Updates Via’.

It would make my day.

Rachid Zaouia At Work © Roger Overall 2011

This evening, Fota Island Resort’s executive pastry chef, Rachid Zaouia, will launch his recipe book Simply Pastry. I’ve written before that this excites me greatly. He asked me to do the photography.

It was one of the best commissions I’ve had. Top Five, easily. Rachid is a tremendous pastry chef, passionate about what he does and appreciative of photography. Working with him was amazing. Not least because I got to eat every single dessert we photographed.

One of my resolutions for 2012 is to produce as much useful content as I can across my blogs. Instead of waiting until 1st January, let me start now by telling you how the photographs in Rachid’s book were lit. (If you’re not a photographer, or find off-camera flash a snooze, this post is about to lose all appeal for you – maybe today’s Dilbert will be consolation).

Two small lights

The entire book was photographed in the hotel’s small fine dining restaurant using two 550EX Canon flashes, triggered remotely by a generic brand of radio transmitter that I can’t identify because I’ve lost the instructions.

I’m not very educated when it comes to off-camera lighting. In fact, I pretty much rely on a single two-flash set up that I can adapt as the situation requires.

I set my camera to manual and my shutter speed to 1/160th. Whatever aperture knocks out all the ambient lighting is where I start. If I’m shooting food, f/5.6 or f/8.0 is nice. Sometimes I’ll go wider, sometimes I’ll stop down a bit further.

I try to keep my flashes, which I also set to manual, at a quarter power or less. That means the batteries will go for ages and recycling times stay zippy.

The ace up any photographer’s sleeve these days is ISO. On a Canon 5DII, you can go as high as ISO800 and still get a very clean image file to work with. That capability is what allows me to keep the flash output relatively low, even at smaller apertures.

One of the flashes controls the ambient light – ie, it sets the base tone of the image. If I want a bright image, it pushes out a lot of light. If I want a darker one, it is more restrained – possibly as much as two or three stops below ‘correct exposure’. Typically, I’ll bounce its light off a ceiling (provided it’s white) or I’ll put a translucent cone on it so it provides even, onmi-directional light.

The second flash is what gives the photograph its character. This light can be modified (snoot, grid, umbrella, gel, etc) and moved about to create any number of moods.

Samples from the book

Flash A was set to give a fairly bright burst of ambient light. Flash B was positioned behind the bowl and the apples, and set to provide a powerful pulse of directional light, giving a sense of morning © Roger Overall 2011

The lighting set up for this photograph was almost exactly the same as above. The only addition was that of some silver foil on the near side of the slice of cheesecake to fill in the shadow © Roger Overall 2011

Same again. Except this time the flash controlling the ambient is switched off and the light behind the dessert had a snoot added to concentrate its output on a narrow part of the photograph © Roger Overall 2011

A much trickier shot. The last one of the day and taken after 12 hours of shooting and under a bit of pressure. We only had one go at this because we had a single Baked Alaska to work with. So I fudged it. I'll be honest. This is two photographs brought together. The reason for that is that flash would have knocked out the flames and made them invisible if it had been misdirected even slightly. If we'd had a couple of desserts to play with, I would have put a tight grid spot on one and directed the light at the specific area I wanted lit. Two or three goes would have done it. So while it is possible to get this in camera, I bottled it on the day because of the single dessert we had. © Roger Overall 2011

Durrus Cheese © Roger Overall 2011

The Durrus Cheese dairy is a little off the beaten track. One of those “left-at-the-crooked-tree-and-straight-on-until-you-meet-the-moonrise” kinda places.

Owner Jeffa Gill gives me simple directions over the phone. She tells me to find the post office in Durrus and pick up written instructions there.

The lady behind the post office counter doesn’t bat an eyelid when I arrive on a wet, stormy Thursday soon afterwards. Almost without looking, she reaches for a stack of stenciled directions, peels one off and slips it to me.

The instructions are straightforward enough. They take me along the narrowest of tracks, where I have to back up twice to allow someone heading in the opposite direction past. That sounds courteous. In reality, I have little choice in the matter. The vehicles heading towards me aren’t stopping – and they are bigger than me.

Hot and humid

Jeffa is there to greet me with real coffee, along with white wellington boots, jacket and hairnet. It’s not a great look for me.

Cheese is temperamental and easily upset, it turns out. Hygiene is paramount. Jeffa is adamant that only correctly suited and booted visitors get in.

She takes me to where the cheese is being made. A huge copper vat of white curd and yellowish whey is cut into a substance that resembles anaemic scrambled eggs. This is the embryonic cheese that is poured into molds, which capture the curds and let the whey drain off.

It is warm and humid in the dairy – something I hadn’t anticipated. My lenses fog up instantly, making it hard to take pictures. But cheese making waits for no one, so I make do as best I can, wiping my lenses every couple of frames.

The curds that become the cheese are warm when they are first poured into the molds and the environment is quite humid for that part of the cheese-making process. Consequently, my lenses would fog up, depending on which room I was in and what was going on there. This image doesn't tell the truth. You'd think the cheese was being made in a sauna. In reality, the air was clear. What you see here is the effect of condensation on the lens © Roger Overall 2011

Rind washed

Jeffa has been making cheese since 1979. She’s good at it. Though she is quick to point out the contribution of her staff, not least Anne, who has been with the business for years. Their children went to school together.

Anne tells me that rind washed cheeses are among the hardest to make. Durrus cheese needs daily love and care over a period of five weeks. Shorter in the case of smaller cheeses. Longer to get a more mature flavour.

Over lunch, Jeffa treats me to delicious bread and, unsurprisingly, cheese, along with a homemade chutney. The cheese is superb, of course. The chutney is first rate too – so good I feel Jeffa could take over the world with it if she so desired.

On departing, she gives me a mature cheese to take away, along with a recipe. “It makes great cheese on toast,” she says.

She’s right. It does.

This arrived in my inbox this morning. It’s been a long time coming.

An invitation to the launch of my first recipe book.

Actually, that’s not accurate at all.

The book is written by Rachid Zaouia, who is the executive pastry chef at Fota Island Resort. The man’s a genius as far as I’m concerned – in the real sense of the word, not in the Apple sense. Simply Pastry is his work, his recipe book, his amazing pastries and desserts.

My contribution was the photography.

More about that soon.

Anthony Creswell. (c) Roger Overall 2011

Anthony Creswell is, without a doubt, one of life’s true gentleman. Calm, warm and good humoured, he seemingly has time for everyone at any time. Certainly, he’s welcomed me on several occasions and let me photograph his smokehouse whenever the whim has taken me.

While I’ve known him for several years now, it occurred to me during a visit last week that I didn’t know his back story. I didn’t even know whether there was one. I knew he was local to Timoleague and grew up there, but had he always been a smoked foods man?

“Wine,” he answers, when quizzed about his background. That’s all I get before the office telephone rings yet again, the land line this time. His mobile goes as well while he is dealing with the call. Like many small artisan food producers, Anthony has to cover many bases and the demands on his time are endless. He has staff, of course, and talks warmly about them, but ultimately he shoulders all of the responsibility for the quality of the Ummera brand. Unsurprisingly, then, his DNA runs deeply through Ummera’s products. He’s a bit like Steve Jobs that way. It makes for delicious food. Don’t rely on my word, though. Instead trust the slew of awards his food has won.

Back to the wine. How did that come about?

He recalls that “Trinity [College in Dublin] and I decided that we weren’t meant for each other” but that he couldn’t hang around at home for long – his father’s patience started to wear thin very quickly. A friend got him a job at a Dublin wine merchants, from where he embarked on a string of jobs in the business around the world over several decades, finally returning to Ireland and eventually setting up a wine shop in Kinsale, Co. Cork. That venture stumbled when excise and duties on alcohol in Ireland increased dramatically. Anthony’s father, Keith Creswell, had been smoking products for over a decade. Anthony joined him.

The phone rings again. A pig farmer looking for marketing and distribution advice. Anthony listens and promises to get back to him with some thoughts. We’re not going to get much back story today.

Instead, I get the chance to take some photographs in the smokehouse where Anthony’s staff are working on smoked chicken breasts and smoked dry cured bacon. Earlier, Anthony had collected some sides of pork from a local slaughterhouse. He also shows me some cuts from a couple of pigs he reared himself. On a previous visit, one of his pigs had taken a dislike to me and had started chewing on my left knee cap while I was taking some photographs of its sibling. Pigs can be surprisingly big and menacing at close quarters. Deceased and partitioned much less so. The meat from Anthony’s own animals, which has been hanging for three weeks, looks delicious.

I watch as the meat is covered in salt and a collection of spices. I ask whether there are any secret ingredients. Anthony almost seems surprised. No, nothing secret. He reels off the constituent parts, but my memory is too feeble to cling on to them. I know the salt is sea salt from Portugal – that much I recall from a previous visit.

When I leave, Anthony gives me a generous pack of the bacon, along with a double fillet of smoked chicken. Supper that evening is exceptional.

Sides of bacon being taken out of Ummera's refrigerated room. (c) Roger Overall 2011

A side of bacon being prepared for marinading at Ummera, Co. Cork, Ireland. (c) Roger Overall 2011

A side of bacon being marinaded at Ummera, Co. Cork, Ireland. (c) Roger Overall 2011

From a very recent food shoot - three slices of bacon being fried (c) Roger Overall 2011

This has been a food-themed week – partly at least. I did a shoot on Tuesday with a terrific food company (terrific in terms of philosophy, drive, story – the works). This photograph stuck with me. It’s a grab shot taken while some food was being prepped. No lighting, no posing, just au naturelle. I have to say, the smell was amazing. Some of the best bacon I’ve tasted – and I’ve had more than my share of good bacon.

While not part of the commission, it is certainly a useful photograph for me. For instance, it’s found its way into proposals I’m pulling together for some food magazines.

Goes to show, you never know where a useful portfolio or sample photograph is going to come from.

Before you know it, several months have passed. As a for instance, the photographs below are from June, which in dog time was just over a fortnight ago. They were taken at a local agricultural show in which pure Aberdeen Angus breeder John Tait was competing.

The amount of preparation that goes into showing cattle on the day is remarkable. Here John is drying off cattle, having applied a spray that improves the animal's coat (see below) (c) Roger Overall 2011

This sprays on and is then blow-dried out to give an enhanced coat (c) Roger Overall 2011

(c) Roger Overall 2011

(c) Roger Overall 2011

I’ve had some great food photography assignments this year. One of the most exciting was a recent shoot with James Whelan Butchers in Clonmel. The current figurehead of the company is Pat Whelan, who is passionate about food, meat in particular, pork especially. He is also a tireless entrepreneur and a driving force behind Tipperary Food Producers. His knowledge about his profession runs very deep. My guess is that what Pat doesn’t know about meat hasn’t been discovered yet.

Pat wanted a series of photographs that conveyed a sense of tradition, pride and artisan values. Something that tells you of a butcher who cares. We bounced around ideas for the best part of three or four months. We emailed, talked, met, looked at books, talked some more and finally arrived at the look and feel we wanted. In the end, it was very simple. Some paper, some twine, some worn implements. And some fabulous meat.

One of the key ingredients was the light. For the look we wanted, there was only one option. Natural daylight. The entire series of photographs was taken using the window in Pat’s office as the light source. Some tinfoil reflectors helped lighten some shadows here and there, nothing more.

This is my favourite photograph from the shoot. Ironically, we hadn’t planned  to photograph it. It was a quick extra set-up while we were waiting for a pork joint to be delivered. I love the textures, the colour and the light.

Three sides of bacon (c) Roger Overall 2011

I remember growing up in Holland that cocoa had a dual, season-dependent purpose. In fact, we drank more of it cold than hot. Moving back to the UK many years later, I don’t recall it being marketed or consumed in that way. Mostly, it was a winter drink. Same here in Ireland. Or perhaps I’d just grown up and switched to Old Speckled Hen or Merlot by then.

Anyway, having produced the packaging photographs for Java Republic’s new The Other Bean For Kids drink, it was interesting to hear that the company is marketing it as a double purpose drink. I couldn’t resist:

The Java Republic's Other Bean For Kids chocolate drink (c) Roger Overall 2011

Drinking it brought back memories. And it’s creating new ones for the next generation:

Always make two batches of a chocolate drink when in the vicinity of a child (c) Roger Overall 2011