Kitchen Stadium Richmond

When I started this blog it, like so many other blogs out there, was about technology albeit with my own particular slant. However I soon realised that I also wanted to blog about cooking. Not because there weren’t enough food blogs already, but because I noticed more and more that people my age and younger seemed to be losing the ability and/or will to cook. For them, dinner consists of take-away, home delivery and eating out at cafes and restaurants. My goal with the recipes I put on this site is to show that food can be easy to cook, still give you time to spend with friends and the very act of serving a meal you prepared, no matter how simple, can be rewarding in itself.

This created a few problems, firstly I’m not the world’s best cook – I’m not even the best cook amongst my friends (see Scott’s amazing A Cook In Chef’s Clothing site) although as I wanted to keep to fairly simple recipes, this wasn’t as much as a problem as I initially anticipated; secondly I live in a relatively small rented one bedroom apartment in an inner suburb of Melbourne. My kitchen consists of a single bench, which includes the cook top and sink. When you put bench-top appliances such as an espresso machine and kettle you’re left with very little bench space. Just as well I wanted to keep the recipes simple!

A balancing act

The flow-on problem from this was that whilst I thought it important to have a photo for almost every step in each recipe’s method, I live alone which meant there was nobody to help to take photos when my hands were messy from food prep or I had to hold a saucepan at an angle to get a good shot. I experimented with a few solutions including trying to balance bowls at unnatural angles such as in the shot at right from my vegetable soup recipe.

Obviously this wasn’t going to work, which brings me to why this post is in the technology section of my blog as well as the food section – technology to the rescue!

Using a Joby Gorillapod I hooked my camera onto the range hood, which gave me a great downward angle for taking pictures of food preparation, however because of the height I couldn’t use the camera’s optical viewfinder or screen to set up the shot. Also because of the angle I could no longer have the flash attached to the camera so the flash had to sit on the bench top and operate in remote mode.

Next step was to hook my Nikon D90 camera to my MacBook via a USB cable and start onOne software’s DSLR Camera Remote server.

With my iPhone on the same WiFi network as the MacBook and onOne’s DSLRemote app, I am able to use the iPhone to get a live view of what the camera is seeing, trigger the camera to take a photo, and adjust other settings on the camera.

The resulting image

Images taken are stored directly on the computer so I can view them instantly on the computer’s screen without having to transfer them from the camera first.

Whilst this solution doesn’t work for when food is cooking – I don’t want the camera hanging above the heat and steam, it is going to be a great help with the preparation shots from now on. The first recipe using this technique will be Potato and Leek soup.

To use the DSLRemote software, you will need a Canon EOS or Nikon DSLR camera; an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and a computer running either MacOS or Windows.