The Storied Shot: Squeezing Lemon for Hamantaschen

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Welcome to The Storied Shot series, where I connect an image I created to a story I shared over on the podcast. In this series, I hope to share tips and tricks to creating a storytelling image, by diving deep into the decisions that I made to produce one particular photograph. If you want to learn more on a particular topic of food photography, I have an ever-growing list of resources linked down below! I always, always appreciate feedback or requests for more information! Just reach out to me at becky@thestoriedrecipe.com!

Here's the image we'll be studying today:

The Challenge

It's always a challenge when photographing a food that I'm not skilled or practiced in cooking/baking. This happens to me a lot, because I don't choose the recipes that I shoot. My podcast guests choose them, and I have no choice but to execute! I love this challenge, but it is just that - a challenge. Because I can't guarantee if any of the final shots are going to be amazing, I take as many ingredient, prep, and action shots as possible. (I talk about this more in the free resource "How To Make Ugly Food Beautiful".)

In this case, there was a special challenge. Lauren lost her mom when she was only 14. Her mother was an artistic, inclusive soul and I wanted that represented and honored in the photos.

Vision

Lauren was proud of her mom's forward approach to cooking in the 70's. While many home cooks at the time were using canned food and shortcut recipes, Maxine brought freshness and flavor to all of her recipes. To her hamantaschen in particular, Maxine added fresh lemon juice, layers of flavor, and nutty textures while still keeping her fillings authentic and traditional. I knew I wanted to get a great shot of squeezing lemon juice, as a way to honor this memory of her mother.

Color Choices

Purim and Hamantaschen are linked together, not just for Lauren and her memories, but for the entire Jewish world. I was thoughtful when choosing the colors for this shoot. Because Purim recalls the courage and bravery of Queen Esther, who used her beauty and intelligence to save the Jewish people, I wanted to give a nod to Esther. I chose purples to run through the shoot as purple is both a color for royalty ("fine linen and purple wool") and a color I associate with early spring, when Purim takes place. The purples also reiterated the plums of the prune filling and beautifully complemented the golds and oranges in the apricot filling.

Composition

When it comes to action shots, it's really important to think about layers in a three dimensional way. You need layers in the foreground or background (or both) through the entire height of the scene. When I stopped styling ONLY down by the food and thought about styling all the way up the frame, that's when my action shots really began to improve. Often, that means adding a vertical element to the scene. In this case, the vertical element was as simple as a pair canes that I pruned off a climbing rose in my yard just a few days beforehand. I thought they had a nice shape, so I stuck them in a glass bottle and that was that! Nothing fancy.

Lighting

Lighting is everything. I needed the light to shine on and through these few tiny drops of lemon juice, so I made a couple of decisions to enhance this effect. First, I made sure the light was very directional - coming from only one source. I shoot in my garage, which has 3 windows and, of course, large doors for the cars. I made sure every door was close and pulled the blackout curtains tight on every window but one. I left the one window open.

When positioning myself in relation to that window, I didn't quite want side light and I didn't quite want back light. I wanted a little bit of both. I wanted backlight so that the light from the window would shine through the drops from back to front. But at the same time, I needed the wall as a dark background to contrast with the bright, lit drops of lemon juice. Therefore, I set up my workplace at a diagonal to the window. You can see from the shadows on my hands and the bright glow on the orange juice that the light is flowing from behind and over my hands. You can see that the light is not coming completely from the side, but from the back also, from a couple of clues.

Look at the folds on my shirt. Rather than the light skimming across it from the side, there is very little light at all on the front.

Also look at the flowers and orange juice on the tray in front of the bowl. You can see the light shining through them, from behind, making them also translucent.

Finally, look at the leaves on the rosebush branches. You can see they are translucent as they curve over the center of the table not on the left, where the backlight is no longer streaming through them.

Technique for Taking a Self Portrait - and how to get those drops sharp

I was the only person home and the only person working the camera the day I took this. In cases like this, I set up a tripod and put my camera on a 10 second timer. To make sure the lemon and the drops (and my hand are sharp), I use something directly BELOW where my hand is going to be. In this case, I found a glint of light in the whisk in the bowl on which I could easily set my focus. Then I took a non-squeezing shot with my hand directly above that spot. When I verified my hand was sharp, I took about three squeezing shots and double checked that they looked ok. Not really a fancy process - I don't shoot tethered or use a remote or anything like that, but this works ok for me, even if it is a little painstaking.

Odds and Ends

I find positioning my hands on these photos to be one of the most difficult parts of the process. In this case, in order for any light to catch that lemon and show it to be a lemon (besides a big, dark lump in my hands), I had to really push it far more out of my grip than I would when normally squeezing a lemon. I think it looks kind of fake and I don't like that. In the end, however, I decided it was more important to clearly alert the viewer that I was holding a lemon.

So! That's the story of this shot!

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