An organized image file comes in handy when clients need replacement images in a hurry. Food, glorious food.

Hudsons on the Bend.

I was sitting in a large, upholstered chair in the corner of my living room yesterday afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee while browsing through the Avedon, "Power" book. My cellphone beeped and I looked over to see if it was someone I wanted to talk to or just another telemarketer trying to sell me solar panels, or "help" me sign up for Medicare. The call was from a friend. 

He owns a restaurant and was trying to get things ready for a "safe" re-opening. He and his partner are starting by doing curbside pick-up and also food delivery. At some point, when they feel it's safe enough, they'll open the patio area for customer and then, down the road, they'll figure out how to re-open their beautiful dining room. 

But the reason for his call was to see if I still had some of the images I'd created for a video project about his restaurant about five years ago. He had some images but they were all tiny thumbnails and the service designing the restaurant's page on an app for delivery needed images with higher resolution. They needed images that were bigger than 1200 pixels on the long side. 

I assured my friend that I could find him the photographs he needed if he could give me ten or fifteen minutes. I closed the Avedon book and put it back on the shelf. I rinsed my coffee cup and put it in the "still using this one" spot to the right of the sink and then headed out the front door of the house and into my office. 

Two quick keyword entries and the folder with the restaurant's images popped up. I selected my favorite, nicely post processed food photos from the venue and sent them, via WeTransfer.com, to my friend. It took all of five minutes. 

It was a quick reminder of the need to keep good records and to have a workable strategy for storing useful images. And one never really knows which images will ultimately be "useful." 

My friend was amazed that I could find the work as quickly as I did and was appreciative. I hope the new strategy for his restaurant works well. He and his partner have survived for over twenty years and I hope this temporary pandemic (and I hope it is temporary...) isn't the thing that stops them. I would feel quite sorry for my friend and I would miss the ambiance of the space, and the delicious food.

The photograph above and the three just below are not from the restaurant I am writing about. They are random food shots that I enjoyed making over the years at other restaurants. Until I pulled these back up I had forgotten how much I like to photograph food. It's a challenging subject matter but it's also one of the most visually interesting. There's always something fun about collaborating with good chefs.

Uchi.

Hudsons on the Bend.

Hudsons on the Bend.

I can hardly wait until my friends get their business up and running again. I have no doubt that as soon as it is safe we'll show up on their doorstep ready to make another fantastic video for them. That's when the fun will re-start for me.

Experimenting: After I delivered the still images I had a thought about re-purposing video frames for quick, lower resolution web use. We've always known that we can pull really nice and very useful 4K video frames out of edited clips and use them as stills but I was curious to see how well it would work from a video that had been shot in 1080p and edited down. A video from five years ago...

I found the video my friend, Chris and I had done for Asti a few years back, pulled it into PhotoShop and started "scrubbing" through it. The edited master I saved was a 10 bit, 4:2:2 file so I thought there was a good chance that the resulting still files would fit the brief that the web app developers had called for. I found frames with the least amount of motion and started saving them out as Jpegs. 

Here's a selection taken directly from the .Mov movie files:

I think the next time I shoot a food video I'll do it at 60 fps with the idea that I might want to use some individual video frames as photographs for web use. That would make the images sharper. It was easy to see that the subject movement that results from 24 fps, while good for video, is less than optimal when you are trying to re-purpose the images. 

Just thought I'd look at images from the perspective of a different use case. A bit of looking backwards in order to be better prepared when looking forward.