![At the chocolate show](https://lefkowicz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/6338048598_49322deec8.jpg)
There I was, happily working my weight down to where I want it, when Karen Seiger at Sirene Media Works and Markets of New York City asked me to shoot the New York Chocolate Show. Rock < Chocolate Show > Hard Place. I like to shoot food and I like to shoot foodies. And I like good chocolate. So at great sacrifice to my personal well-being, I went.
One of the reasons I was eager to go was to find solutions for some problems for a workshop I’m putting together on photography for food writers and bloggers, and one of the problems is lighting. I was struck by a lot at the show, and you can find some photos from my story of chocolate as art here. I was interested in getting some interesting photos without a lot of gear, in a short space of time, and under the visually chaotic and crappy varied lighting conditions of a trade show.
I’d recently bought a LED light panel (a 4 X 6 LED array, CF9014 from Calumet Photo as was) and happened to bring it along. It’s designed to go on top of a video camera, runs on 4 AA cells, is pretty small, and has a swing-put-of-the way diffusion screen and CTO filter attached. And it works pretty well.
I’m interested in matters historical, having been in the history business in a past life, and found a booth manned by the historical division of Mars, called American Heritage Chocolate. (I wish I’d thought of that one …) They were reproducing a 1750s-era American colonial recipe for a spiced hot chocolate, and were grinding the cocoa nibs and spices on a heated stone mortar. A black stone mortar. In the dark. (Well, near dark.) So I pulled out the LED panel, dialed it up a little over the darkness, and filled in the darker bits, giving some decent specular reflections to the chocolate, and getting some details where there had been none visible. Try it.
![Grinding chocolate](https://lefkowicz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/6347300175_aac4448640.jpg)
More photos of the American Heritage Chocolate exhibit at the New York Chocolate Show.
Tech notes for those to whom these things mean something: Canon 5D, 24-70mm f/2.8 L lens, ISO 1000, 1/50 sec, f/4. Handheld. Every try to get a tripod into one of these shows? You’ll break something. Or someone. LED panel used on the one shot of the grinding only. I shot some of the story with an Olympus E-P2, Panasonic 20mm f/1.8 lens.