These tacos defied all my attempts at food styling. I thought I’d gotten better at shooting food since the early blog days of dreary lighting and blurred images, but as the sun set on the windowsill where I take photos for BGSK, I could not pull off a single half-decent image of the tacos I’d just admiringly created out of the finest heirloom beans, artisan cornmeal, and organic multicolored peppers.
It didn’t help that the assemblage of all those ingredients was ridiculously messy. Piles of sautéed farmers’ market peppers in red, green, white, and purple slipped around beneath scoops of neutral-colored beans from Rancho Gordo and schmears of herbed avocado threatening to turn brown before we got a chance to eat, let alone photograph. Did it help the composition that my vegan tacos were wrapped up in yellow-ish-brown corn tortillas? Nope.
I climbed up on the Ikea stepstool and balanced one foot on the garbage can, like I often do. I upped my ISO, opened my lens all the way.
My arms shook. My images blurred. Finally, I called in the big guns. Alex has steady arms, and he pulled off a shot. Only then could we eat.
What a difference twenty minutes makes! In twenty minutes, you can go from pulling off a crisp shot of your sliced peppers to not being able to capture an image of tacos without the beans blurring into a muddled ochre mess.
Now I realize that these are not your woes. But hidden inside this sob story of photographic failure is the fact that these tacos take twenty minutes start to finish.
Yes, in the same third of an hour that it took the sun to melt below the Brooklyn brownstones, I sliced and sautéed peppers with shallots, seasoned pinto beans, blended avocado with garlic and herbs, and toasted corn tortillas in my cast iron skillet. That’s all that these vegetarian tacos require.
