This is a personal independent projects, I want to try food photography, based on a column I’ve seen before. The cuisine this time is the Pineapple and Apple with Honey Lemon Sauce by Alain Passard and Sousvide Chicken Thighs from Chefsteps. Speaking about the Chefsteps, this website was a beginning guide for me of the modernist cuisine with Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, I am highly recommend it, even though I can’t make most of their receipts.

This project was done by Sony A7RIII I get from my firend, the efficiency of digital photography is just on another level.

This photo was created by compositing photos with PS, referencing this one.

The receipt is from this video, it is a petty simple one. The only key is to make the honey sauce: mix honey, lemon juice and olive il in a 2:1:4 ratio then blend until it emulsifies into a thick consistency, that’s all. Paring it with apple slices and pineapple would helps neutralize the think texture of the sauce, I also added some zest of lime. The sauce I have here didn’t mix wel because I spent too much time to set everything up after I finish it, so make eveything when you want to eat.

The sousvide chicken thigh is also an easy cuisine, it just request you buy one sousvide machine. As a person who purchased 3 Anova, Joule, which is from Chefstep’s team would be a much better option for family cooking, I have heard that this machine has a very low request for water level, which might be the most importnat thing for sousvide machine.

Sousvide Chicken Thigh

• Remove the bone from skin on thigh, do not use skinless thigh just because they are boneless. If you don’t eat skin then just eat breat, it is the essence of this cuisine. The bone can collect to make stock.
• Season the thigh with paper and salt, about 1%of thigh.
• Put seasoned thigh into the water bath bag, add oil and thyme; I added some crushed garlic for extra flavor. Make sure the skin is not covered by anything or folded; this matters for how this cuisine looks in the end.
  • If you do not have a vacuum seal machine (which I highly recommend for every family cook), use water displacement method.
• water bath at 65 °C for 45 min.
• Take thigh out to a  paper towel, make it dry gently.
• Heart a skillet with medium fire, add the thigh skin side down without oil, the fat between skin and meat will melt out. cook the thigh about 2 mins untill the skin looks brown.

Sweet potato Puree

• Remove the skin of the sweet potato.
• Steam the sweet potato to soft which you can easily insert a folk into the potato, this may need about 30-45 mins.
• Prepare 100g water, 100g butter and 5g salt for each 500g sweet potato we get in the last step, blend them to smooth.
• Use a sieve to filter any possible big parts in the puree.

To assemble, put the Puree on the plate and use the back of a spoon to make it cover evenly; put 1 kale over the Puree, and the rest around the Puree, cut the kale if it is too big, make sure you can still see the Puree under the kale; Thigh should be finished cooking at this moment, put it over the kale, and add some lemon juice. That’s it.

2021 Document photography: Subway

The Subway is the second big project I did after Boston. This is a portrait-centric project aimed at capturing the unique conditions of people within the environment of the subway area. This project is my re-creation with the subway as the theme after absorbing the lack of connection between the work and the theme in the previous project and strengthening it. The main purpose is to capture the different expressions of different people on the subway. Of course, the subway here is not just a single train space, but also includes concepts such as platforms, halls, and stairs that can evoke people’s memories.
I chose the subway as the central theme of this project because I have a personal affinity for this mode of transportation. As a person from Shanghai, the subway was an integral part of my daily commuting experience that I couldn’t easily abandon. In contrast, in Boston, the subway was almost the only feasible form of public transportation. At that time, public bikes were prohibitively expensive, and buses were not only infrequent—running roughly every 30-45 minutes—but also unreliable in terms of punctuality. (I can’t vouch for the exact timing, as I hardly ever used buses in Boston, resorting mostly to shuttle buses during subway downtimes.) Unlike the crowded, stand-dominated subways of Shanghai, Boston’s subway offered a more relaxed ambiance, Seats were generally available unless it was during rush hours, and this spacious environment revealed expressions of relaxation on passengers’ faces that I felt were well worth capturing.
Unlike Boston, this project is something I’m quite pleased with. Therefore, I’ve decided to release it in two parts. You can either view the remastered version here, or watch the original version in the next page.

2020 Photo Practicum: Boston

Boston was the first thematic photography project I attempted in 2020 for my Photo Practicum course at Emerson College. This project was initially designed as a city landscape photography project, but I later tried to add a sense of loneliness, as it was created during the COVID era. I primarily used a Mamiya 6×7 camera to shoot 120 film in large format, but I also fused some images I took with 35mm film.

Now, looking back, this project was done pretty badly. The theme of loneliness wasn’t adequately conveyed—half of the project was just simple street photography, lacking the crucial theme of ‘loneliness.’ The composition was also not well-executed—I was testing every lens I could get from the equipment center (those days when you didn’t need to fill out an entire form for gear were great). But the fact is, some photos simply lacked a clear topic, making them difficult to understand.

The mix of cameras was another big issue. Most of the good photos were shot in a 6×7 ratio, but to meet the project requirements, I also included some 16×9 images, which, in hindsight, was probably the worst decision. The 6×7 images were large enough for further editing, but the 16×9 ones were just too small for the same level of adjustments. You’ll see this difference in my new edits to those photos.

Even though this project doesn’t feel very strong now, it still marked the beginning of my personal creative journey. I’m sure there are a few great photos I captured—some needed extra editing, while others still hold up well after all these years. So, I’d like to share this inexperienced project with you. Some of the images have been re-edited to reflect my current taste, but I’ll leave it to your own eyes to judge how well I did.

The photos below were selected for my project back in 2020, but I don’t feel they are good enough nowadays. They’re still worth a look—at least, I believe so—but they just don’t hold up as well as the earlier ones.