Today I'm introducing a new and rewarding photoshoot in a restaurant, but not just any restaurant. This time the client was one of the best Japanese-style restaurants in all of Havana, if not all of Cuba. Its name is Fuumiyaki and it's located in the modern neighborhood of Nuevo Vedado. As it couldn't be different, after a lot of photographing I ended up learning new things in gastronomic photography, and perhaps it also applies to product and advertising photography in general. It turned out that, being a dark place as most of the restaurants are, I worked all the time with the diaphragm of the lens open to the widest possible. This resulted in photos with a very shallow depth of field and, therefore, images that were only in focus at one point and quite out of focus in its surroundings. This can be interesting and even useful from many points of view in some photos, but in others it detracts from the visibility and sharpness of the product, which is ultimately what the shoot is all about. Reflecting on how to solve this, I've thought of bringing my tripod the next time, so that I can position my camera on it in such a way that I can shoot at a very slow shutter speed and, at the same time, close the aperture to around f10 and thus ensure a wide coverage of the depth of field and, hence, a greater number of elements in the photo perfectly in focus.
