That’s ham-stuffed rolled chicken and pasta in the photo — a reproduction of a dish we used to enjoy at the food court of Shangri-la Plaza. It was my second time to make and plate and photograph it.
The photos from the first time were better. I remember taking them on the kitchen counter of the kitchen of our old house. The mess in the background could be seen in the frame so I cropped away until only half of the plate was visible with the lens zoomed in on the two slices of chicken in front, melted cheese oozing out, and the pasta with the dollop of white sauce washed out in the background. They were stored in a hard drive that got corrupted and when I needed to re-upload the photos a decade later (I had developed better post-editing skills by then), I couldn’t recover the originals.
Hence, the second photo op in 2016. We had moved to another house by then. We had a nice garden with a mango tree and I loved taking photos in the shade of the tree. All the chicken and pasta photos turned out to be quite unusable. The plate was wrong (I hadn’t started investing in picture-pretty dinnerware at the time), the plating was bad (I had been blogging for over ten years in 2016 and I still sucked at plating) and the lighting was terrible (apparently being outdoors is not enough — there are only certains hours of the day when natural lighting is ideal for food photography).
I unpublished the recipe with the hope that I will remember to cook the dish again and take new photos. It’s 2026 — yes, another ten years have passed — and I’m still stuck with the bad photos.
I wonder if I should count:
- How many recipes for great dishes never got published because the photos were bad because of plating, lighting, unwanted objects in the frame — take your pick and
- How many great photos had never been used because the dishes themselves were not so good and, therefore, not worth publishing.
The recipes for good dishes, I can take new photos of. The not-so-good recipes can be improved, but I still have to take new photos. If I do both, I can create a whole new blog as big as Umami Days, but with flawless images, text and formatting.
The thought excites me.
Marie is sweet, round and plain, and loved in every continent
