Month: February 2024

Photograph:

I have worked in kitchens for almost the entirety of my working life. I say if you can work in a kitchen you can work anywhere. Working with food and handling customers is the most challenging yet rewarding thing I have ever done.

The conceptuality behind this photograph is that of a kitchen on a busy night. You wouldn’t know this was shot on my living room coffee table. I wanted to make it seem like the Chef behind this just cut up some crostini on the baking table but is also making squid ink pasta and house made chai at the same time so the chef left it to attend to other orders.

It’s chaotic but it’s in slow motion. This captures a moment of calm even though behind the scenes there’s food, spatulas, dishes and yelling, and exhaustion flying around the kitchen.

Also did someone just serve undercooked beef?

I enjoyed this assignment, thank you.

Super Bowl Commercial:

T-Mobile Home Internet Feeling

Dunkin Donuts ft Ben Affleck

Popeyes

Cerea Ve

State Farm

I found the commercials to be stupid for some reason. Billion dollar corporations spend millions on a Super Bowl add that don’t bother paying a fair wage really irk me. In fact those commercials make me not want to buy or subscribe to their service. I have T-Mobile because they kind of cornered the market but other than that I’ve seen the way these companies treat their employees and it ain’t right. Not a fan of rooting for corporate commercials.

They had a commercial for Popeyes but I’d rather see a commercials for a chicken sandwich from Rachel’s Ginger Beer; a local company that deserves more recognition instead of a company already raking in millions if not billions. Although fun to watch it isn’t my jam.

The Cera Ve was funny, too much damn lens flare though, but trying to make you think of Cera Ve and Michael Cera interchangeably is pretty clever. Good job marketing TEAM!

The cinematography was well done in all of these commercials, the lighting is on point and they probably had to hire the best people to curate such a great vibe, although I don’t like watching commercials for fun haha. The money part bugs me though, the wage gap bugs me, seeing rich people on the TV depicting poor people and thinking it’s all fine bugs me but whatever such is our society. It’s all weird these days and those days and days in between.

I’m going to make keto desserts. I love sweets, sweets are tasty, sweets are Devine, but sweets are no good when eaten in mass quantities. You see humans crave dopamine and that’s what sweets produce in our brains, so I want to make desserts that are sugarless so I can eat lots of sweets and do no harm to my insulin levels.

If sweets were good for you I’d eat handfuls of sugar locked in a room for days without water or anything else, that’s why I need to start making keto desserts.

I’ve been working in restaurants for my entire working career and I feel that food photography is a growing trend especially with “influencers” and restaurants alike looking to boost their production value. I just want to take pleasing pictures of food because half of the experience of eating food is looking at it.

This will benefit my overall portfolio, and also give people a reason to switch off of sugar since it’s pretty unhealthy but addictive.

I want pretty photos of food in my portfolio

Patrick Tensen

New Media

02/01/2024

A piece of work I’m proud is a photograph I took of me dropping coins on my apartment floor.

It was January 2020 and I was really big into stopping moving objects with a high shutter speed; I’d take photos of fire, birds mid-flight and planes taking off from Boeing field. I had a lot of time on my hands back to experiment with amateur  photography, I knew nothing about photo editing software such as photoshop and even Lightroom my only editing software was Instagram filters, but I knew a bit about composition and basic camera settings to pull off a shot like this. 

I grabbed some coins from my coin jar, and off to my 112 year old apartment’s oak floor I went. My camera was stacked on top two books, I set a 2 second timer on my Canon 80D and started dropping my hard earned lunch money on the floor. I remember taking not too many photos but just enough to justify it being an actual “photoshoot” I took enough until I was satisfied with the shot, I took about 50 shots and most of them are framed the same but the coins were scattered along in different areas of the floor.  I’m an impatient person (learning to relax more) so I quickly took it off my camera and uploaded it to instagram.

I’m most proud of my work because it’s the photo I get the most compliments on and the closet photo to professionalism I had before learning about photography. I’m also proud because I know what I would do better now after almost two quarters of learning photography and photoshop. Would I do anything different? Hell yeah! I would have made the background more meaningful, maybe even a blank wall with something interesting that screams “me” instead of my bed. I also would have also made sure my floor wasn’t dirty I think you can see a hair on the bottom left I didn’t realize this until today. 

It’s the small achievements in life.