BREAKFAST FOR THE CAMERA
Let’s call this section Breakfast 101 and keep things
simple. Making a full breakfast for photography, as
pictured here, isn’t rocket science. However, a working
knowledge of a few basic techniques and tricks will
certainly make the task easier. One of the most impor-
tant things, as always, is the order of preparation. Pan-
cakes can be frozen, biscuits can be frozen or held for
most of a day after cooking, bacon can be prepped early
the day of photography; but almost all types of cooked
eggs need to be prepared right before they are built on
the hero plate.camera. Bacon can actually be prepared the morning of
the shoot, but it will need some additional attention
before it is built onto the hero plate.
Shopping wisely always pays off. For the chapter-opening
shot, I chose bacon from the butcher’s case because it had
a high proportion of meat to fat and because it was a nice
width. Some prepackaged bacon is very narrow and is
also cut very thin. It does not photograph as well as wider,
thicker bacon like the type found in the butcher’s case.TRICKS OF THE TRADE The liquid in the coffee cup in our shot
is a mixture of brewed coffee and water. For photography, coffee
needs to be diluted with water since it appears very black if used at
full strength. Dilute the coffee until it has a rich brown color when
viewed from camera.Making Bacon for the Camera
Rather than laying fl at on the plate, some movement
along the length of each piece of bacon is nice for pho-
tography. Th e movement, or undulations, creates inter-
est and catches light. You could bake or fry bacon all
day and perhaps get a few hero slices with movement.
But, you may want to instead resort to a few tricks that
can turn each slice of bacon into hero quality for the