Lunch today was some Pad Kapraw Thai Rice Noodles. The noodles came with a flavour packet which I used. Pad Kapraw is apparently a basil-flavoured sauce, but the overriding flavour when the powder hit the pan was of liquorice. Luckily the finished dish had a very mild flavour, sweet and hot; not having had much Thai food I'm not sure how sweet Thai basil really is, so I'm assuming the liquorice-like flavour is a bit like it.

The rest of the dish contains a stir-fry of vegetables: bean sprouts, mushrooms, several coloured peppers and carrot, all sliced thin so they'd cook quickly. The rice noodles have to be handled carefully, cooked al dente (about 4 minutes) and rinsed thoroughly in cold water. They seem insubstantial compared to wheat noodles, but don't be fooled: as time goes by they soak up water and become plumper. Like rice itself, a little goes a long way.

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God bless the digital camera, that turned documenting everything you have for lunch into a viable option; the minutiae of everyday life into viable subjects. Face it, most of us take the food we eat for granted, not paying it much more attention than whether it arrives on our plates hot and on time and if it's tasty. But to those among us who are happy to call ourselves gourmands and foodies, the food we eat is a thing of beauty, to be cherished, considered, and respected.

One of the things I never thought I'd ever be good at, let alone be asked for tips on, is food photography. But life takes us in unexpected directions, and over six years of having a digital camera, food photography has become and important and enjoyable part of my photo-taking. In the film days I was always curious about it, and would drool over beautifully-photographed cookbooks, but I don't ever recall taking any food photos.

Now I take food photos nearly every day. It doesn't seem like a special thing to me: I have no fancy light boxes or complex studio set-ups -- like a lot of you out there I simply take pictures of the food I eat for lunch or dinner in the available light I have with either my compact camera or digital SLR, whichever suits my mood. So when people compliment me on my food photos and ask me, "How do you do it?" ...well, I'm both amused and slightly baffled.

Just such a thing occurred on Twitter a few weeks ago. I was looking through an old folder of unwritten blog posts and tweeted offhand about coming across a food photography post I had planned and abandoned years ago. Soon people were asking me to post these tips, and I promised to, but it slowly slipped out of my mind. Then people started reminding me, saying they were looking forward to it, and I was even more intrigued.

So I gave it a long hard think, and came to the conclusion that I would need a whole book to talk about food photography. Maybe I will write one some day, but for now I needed to make a blog post!

So I asked myself, "What are the basic elements of good food photos? What are the essential factors people should look for, a mental checklist to tick off when they're taking photos of their lunch?"

And so I came up with these:

More home-made sandwiches for lunch! I left them open for the sake of the photograph.

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I made sandwiches for lunch today. One of them's a simple tomato, cucumber & edam cheese with red lettuce and chutney. The second is a sauteed mushroom with smoked turkey job. I haven't eaten them yet. Off to do that now.

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(Since a couple of people asked for the recipe of this after I tweeted it yesterday, and I got tired of repeating the same in chat windows and comment boxes, and figured I might as well post it here.)

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So a few thousand years ago a guy and his wife set out for home after fourteen years of exile in the spiffy jungles of peninsular India, and having just rescued his missus from the clutches of a very bad guy with ten heads, he decided that he was totally entitled to the guy's flying car for the journey home -- spoils of war and all that. This being the days before the IATA and GPS, the folks back home tried to make things easier for their returning king (whose slippers were doing a fine job of running the kingdom in his stead, apparently) and lit up the entire city so he could spot them from the air.

Hang on -- did Laxman have to walk home?

Further adventures in processed food in this, the fourth and much delayed strip of the second Comic Konga! Click on the image to see the full strip.

The drawing is all over the place in this. I'm just a bit out of it this week, I suppose, running around doing real life stuff. One more left; have the script, should draw it asap.

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Third day, third strip of the second Comic Konga!. Today's strip is a two-pager, so click on the thumbnail above to bring up the first page, and then click next at the bottom to see the second. Alternately, you can click here to directly see the second page.

I can't say I really hate mint chocolate -- the ice-cream version is something I enjoy quite a bit -- but most varieties of it are not very well made, and the experience is more negative than positive.

I have no idea what tomorrow's strip will be. Oh noes!

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Here's the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow's strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I'm not going to do full colour versions (Today's strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I'm doing design).

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