Food photography shoot-Ribs

For this image I wanted to try and showcase the results from on of South Africa’s most infamous cooking methods, The Braai.

This image was of course taken in South Africa.

Essentially what a Braai is, is a fire with a grid over the top of the fire and what you will usually find on the Braai is meat. The fire can be made through various methods such as gas or charcoal but many South African’s will tell you that charcoal is the only way as it adds more flavor to it.

So I decided to try and cook my own meat on the Braai. The meat I decided on was pork ribs, BRM, from Pick n Pay. Once the ribs were cooked I plated them up and prepared for the image.

I tried to showcase that when the Braai is done and the meat is cooked that not only meat is eaten with the meal. So to try and show that I included some lemons, also for the colour balance effect it had, and some lettuce leaves, they also gave the image a bit more depth of field.
However this did not show the full picture and was still missing a few aspects. So to fix that I added a beer, frothed to make it look more appetizing, and some salt and pepper shakers.

After that I was ready to take the image. I decided to go for a bit of a rougher lighting style to make the image feel more like it was taken outside, right after Braaing.

All in all there were some errors such as I could have maybe softened the light to remove some hotspots on the ribs but the image turned out very closely to what I wanted it to be

Below you can find a diagram of the lighting used( the person in the image references the ribs).