Ever since my parents bought me a cellphone with a built-in VGA camera, I’ve been taking photos of food I eat in restaurants, in the houses of friends, as well as food I rarely ever get to eat at home. I had to bear with the colors of the food looking dull in the photo in a small resolution of 320 x 240. Indeed, the subjects often didn’t appear with crisp detail, but the noise in the image sure did!

I’d take five minutes or longer taking a picture of a bowl filled with scoops of ice cream, and my parents would tell me to stop taking pictures because the ice cream has already melted. I thought this was food photography. I only discovered that most subjects were in fact “fake food”. I forgot about the fact that ice cream would completely melt, and perhaps evaporate when exposed to bright and warm lighting for more than ten minutes! It also saddened me to learn that I can’t eat the subject after taking a picture of it.

This is my closest experience to “food photography”, as I helped a bit with arranging the subject on the plate. I did take a few shots of the subject at the best position I could think of at the time, and I tried to cherish it, because it would be the last time I could even see such an arrangement of seafood pasta. When the time came for the subject to be dumped and scrapped like waste, I volunteered to throw the whole thing, without thinking. I felt bad and really guilty about throwing the pasta and all the “toppings” in one of those colored bins, but later, I felt that at least we were still able to take shots of it. Either way, we can’t eat it anyway.