Learning a new camera over a burrata pizza
Four frames from The Pizza Bakery in HSR Layout, Bengaluru, shot not long after I bought my first camera, and what a slow kit lens can and cannot do at ISO 6400.
The camera was new enough that I was still taking it places to find out what it did. This was one of those places — The Pizza Bakery in HSR Layout, Bengaluru, an evening in April, friends, and no occasion beyond dinner. I brought it on purpose. These are some of the first frames I got out of it.
By the time I started shooting, the room was emptying out. That turns out to matter more than anything I did with the settings.
What a kit lens gives you in a dark room
The RF-S 18-45mm opens to f/4.5 at the wide end and f/6.3 at the long end. In a restaurant lit by one warm bulb over each table, that leaves you two levers and both of them cost something.
All four frames are ISO 6400. Three of them are between 1/25s and 1/30s, which is about the floor for hand-holding this lens before the frame starts to smear. The oven shot is 1/60s at 45mm, and only because the fire was doing the lighting.
There is no version of this evening where I get clean files. The choice was grain or nothing, and grain photographs a room better than a flash does.
The oven
The photograph I like most is the one I had the least to do with. It was shot from our table, across the room, at the long end of the zoom — I did not ask him, and he did not look up. The oven lit him and everything above the counter went black on its own.
That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick: find the one bright thing in a dark room and let the rest go.
The burrata
The pizza was burrata on a wood-fired sourdough base, and the reason it looks like it does is the way the chef put the cheese on — torn and spread by hand, right at the end. It made the whole thing look better than a neater version of it would have.
I shot it from directly above, uncut, before anyone touched it. The drink from an earlier frame is still sitting in the corner of the shot, refusing to get out of the way.
What the photographs missed
Four frames, twelve minutes, and the food was genuinely good. But what I actually remember from that evening is my friends and how much we laughed, and there is no frame here that has any of that in it.
Which is probably the most useful thing I learned that night. The camera got the oven and the burrata. It was never going to get the rest.