Home Pastries With The OMD

 

That looks tasty, my wife was baking these pastries at home and I immediately remembered a short movie Phillip Bloom made of his mother cooking, it was brilliant, so I decided to do something similar but with stills, and document the main parts of the process. It will be also a chance to talk about the OMD for a bit.

I am not ready yet to give my final impressions on the OMD since I haven't had enough experience with it like other cameras, I am now at around ~ 1200 shots on the clock, back to our topic.

 

I find it easier to pick up the OMD and take shots around the house than I did with my 5D3, don't read this as an advantage for the OMD over a DSLR, it's not, this is an advantage to my current storage camera bag over my previous Lowepro Pro Runner 200AW DSLR storage solution, it's just easier for me to lift the cover on my Thinktank Retrospective 5 bag and pick the OMD with my favorite do-it-all lens attached, the Panasonic Leica 25mm f/1.4 lens (50mm equivalent), the result is that I'm shooting more at home than I used to.

 

So why didn't I pick the Sony RX100 that is always at hands reach, just beside my keys? A couple of reasons, I still don't like holding the camera and shooting through the back LCD compared to a viewfinder, it is not as stable, and the Sony lost aperture quickly once I zoomed in, and I wanted some shots at fast apertures, so I picked the OMD since I was planning to do all shots using available light, at the lowest ISO possible, hand held.

 

 

This is the core flour paste used to make the goodies, in all of the shots there are two equally strong light sources, flourescent ceiling lights, and tungsten spot lights over the kitchen top, you can notice that by looking at the top and the inside of the paste in the image above.

 

I was shooting at ISO 200 which is the lowest ISO setting, and despite planning to shoot close to wide-open, I found myself shooting @ f/3.5 or thereabouts for adequate DOF, this of course resulted in ~ 1/10 sec shutter speeds, but the IBIS dealt with that quite nicely. You can also see that the AWB have dealt with the mixing color temperatures quite nicely.

 

 

This is the filling, white cheese mixed with small mint pieces, you might not believe it until you try it, but it gives those pastries their main flavor and taste. Also despite planning on using the viewfinder, I used the tilting LCD for some of the shots to get more interesting angles.

 

 

Here's the cheese put on a piece of the paste, the image is not sharp because I was holding my daughter with one hand, and shooting with the other hand using the back LCD, not the best scenario when the shutter speeds are slow.

 

 

And here's a full set almost ready to get in the oven, just one more addition remaining.

 

 

Before they enter the oven the top parts of the pastries are painted with raw eggs to give them a brown glow when they get in the oven.

 

 

In the oven, as you can notice, she made several sets of pastries, different shapes and different fillings, the oven light was a weird deep orange color, I guess they made it that way to look similar to fire glow.

 

 

And here's the final product, see that brown crisp on the top? That's the egg paint.

 

Overall, I am very satisfied with the OMD, it has certainly exceeded my initial expectations coming from a 5D3, and I am still learning more of its characteristics everytime I use it.