Fish and chips, islands style

A passing fisherman offered two 1.5kg freshly caught mackerel for K10 (AU$4, US$3) just in time for lunch so we bought them on the spot. My wife had just harvested some cooking bananas, so half an hour later, the fried fish and chips (fush n chups in New Zealand speak; fish with fries in the US) production line was in full swing and the kids, all having had an early day off at school, were clustering around and salivating freely!

The chips are slices of cooking banana -- a staple here, in fact, probably the main staple. Taste and texture are very similar to standard potatoes. What do we call them? When I was a kid in Australia, we called them "English potatoes" but that, of course, is a lie. "Engish turnips", yes, but "English potatoes"? Nope.

I added a little salad to my plate, and cleared the small table for further development of my Q&D food photography technique.

Front light was diffused sky light from the verandah's open side, with a little side light (from left) of the same ilk. For the back light, I used the FL36R flash with a reflector attached above it triggered by the in-camera flash on the GX7 (which was set to trigger only). I set the back light to TTL and over-exposed by 1 stop.

The camera was set to Vivid mode (because I forgot to reset it after this morning's outing!).

The reflector is made from two supermarket foam food trays stapled to a little lath of balsa wood split from a balsa wood drinks coaster from one of the local hotels (balsa wood is a local industry so there is a lot of it about), then held in position by rubber bands purloined from the kids.

Worked pretty well. I am experimenting with this because it can be flat in my bag when I travel, unlike the diffuser made by sticking the flash in an empty plastic bottle as shown in an earlier thread on this theme. On the other hand, it feels a bit fragile.

I think it was ... (aargh, the name temporarily escapes me) ... who suggested something like this (but much better looking than mine) a while back.