Nature Does Not Lie with Colours

It's Friday again and the restaurant closes! Oops not quite as Noodle Cook waited till Sunday this time, for another romantic dinner. The confit salmon cooked to perfection after an earlier run for the new Degustation Menu. Unlike Chubby Hubby, Noodle didn't have a makeshift studio to photograph the dinner! When Noodle's romantic dinner photographs went out of focus and got ruined by backlighting, it seemed like yet another dramatic end to a dinner cooked by Noodle.

According to "Does My Blog Look Good In This" (DMBLGIT #8), the food blogger photography competition: "Those that didn't do so well suffered from poor focus and poor lighting. So for the next round take a little time with the focusing (a tripod perhaps) and give some consideration to the light source and overall illumination...".

Well, good lighting and photographic opportunities are not always found together in real life. So, what does one do with a photograph considered "bad"? Expert photographer, Stephen of "What's for Dinner?" suggested to use the shake to the advantage what he did with his pizza and ice cream. While Stephen expertly achieved moods through clever lighting, Noodle's immediate approach was to cheat with Photoshop, and play with colours...

The reminder of the ambience for the dinner was a beautiful vase of daisies. The poor focus was disguised using a "wind" filter in Photoshop, which seemed very appropriate as the dinner went smoothly and quickly, a bit hazy, like in a "breeze". The poor lighting and colour were adjusted by referring to colours in nature. In design, the expression "Nature does not lie" is applied to harmonising colours by looking at examples in nature. In the absence of formal studies into colours, using nature is a great idea.

It was decided after studying a daisy from the garden that orange works well with the blues and purples as a complementary colour.



To show that the colour works, an orange cookie cutter, placed over the daisy, frames the daisy perfectly.



After adjusting the background to orange for the vase of flowers, the photograph really captured the mood for the dinner. Also, the confit salmon looked wonderful after digital removal of backlighting and brightening of the foreground with deeper, richer colours and a matching orange.



The pictures for this post work well even though they were out of focus or have bad lighting, proving the point that poor focus and poor lighting aren't the end of everything!