2019 was the year that I had a lot of fun photographing at a food market in Montreal. I'm not a stranger to food photography and as long as the light is good and the food is high quality it's hard to make a bad image.

When Belinda and I were on vacation in Montreal in October we visited a famous outdoor food market. We don't have anything like it in Austin so we stayed for a long time and looked at pretty much everything. 

I've done a number of food photography assignments for magazines, did my first cookbook (Creative Mexican Cooking, by Anne Lindsey Greer) for Texas Monthly Press in the early 1980s, contributed many, many photographs for the internationally awarded, Fonda San Miguel: Thirty Years of Food and Art, cookbook and art Latin art collection book in 2007. Recently I've done several videos for restaurants that are centered around beauty shots of the food and food preparation. In addition to those experiences I also love to eat food. 

Our photography in Montreal was mostly done with my Pentax K-1 camera and the 50mm f1.4 lens or the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 Pentax lens. It worked well. The color and the detail in the files are the equal of any 35mm format camera currently in the market. We can argue about usability and lens availability but the ability of the camera to make absolutely beautiful files is argument-proof. The full frame sensor helps with limiting depth of field in order to focus attention on main subjects while the camera's in-body image stabilization is great and provides a good platform for longer than normal exposures --- which help keep the ISO down.

While the Lumix S1 and S1R are at least equal in their sensors' abilities to make beautiful files where the new cameras really shine for me is the selection of lenses I've been able to put together. They transcend most of the available Pentax lenses and let me work right out to the edge. 

That being said, I have a warm spot in my heart for the Pentax K-1. It's definitely designed and built to be one of the most useable and comfortable cameras I ever had the pleasure to shoot with --- even when it didn't quite hit focus....