Adam Liaw Instagram – Tonight’s dinner. Creamy chicken, leek and mushroom stew. Just a perfect one-pot dinner for this chilly weather. This is from my latest book, 7 Day of Dinner, plus a little bit on dinner snaps vs professional photography.
The first shot is one I took tonight just plonking it in front of a camera before eating, but the second shot is how it appears in the book. For books we need the photos to tell a story. You have to be able to see every ingredient, and to be able intuit the cooking (and eating) process from the image so that it helps you follow the recipe.
I have a great photography and styling team that I work with to shoot my books, and I truly think that the recipe images are as valuable to a cookbook as the recipe itself (if not more so) because they communicate so much more information than you can in words. By looking at either image you can see how thick the sauce is and how brown the chicken is – even how the leeks and mushrooms are cut – without having to pore over every word in a recipe.
That said, there’s something about the basic, unstyled (and frankly pretty poorly photographed) image of our dinner tonight that feels a bit more real to me. But maybe that’s just because it’s what I’m actually having for dinner tonight.
The second shot is obviously a better photo, but which one makes the dish feel more like something you might make? | Posted on 11/Jul/2024 13:28:17
