Street Food

On a Sunday afternoon, there's nothing better if you live in the hip part of East London than a stroll down Street Art / Street Food (Brick) Lane, from London Fields passing through the cafe society of Broadway Market, perusing Columbia Road Flower Market's exotic plants and ending up at the UP Market next to Spitalfields. Home to a 100#s of world food stalls.

STEEM & SMELLS

Smells of coriander, garlic, pungent, spicy & thick with steem as punters jostle tasting this and that, deciding what to have. The choice is endless and if London does one thing well it's food from other cultures. A staggering, Olympian array of sushi, sashimi, stews, curries, crispy pancakes, black bean, yellow bean and a hundred other bean dishes all sizzling away, conspiring to send the nostrils and tongue buds into a frenzy of delirious excitement.

• STEEMED Buns delicious chinese snack food 1/80th @f5.6 ISO 400

Spoilt for Choice

Often one has to walk around and get a feel for what's on offer, what's looking fresh. Fancy a custom cooked Okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes) or steaming hot Char Sui Buns? It's a challenging place to shoot, not least because you're liable to end up with a steamy lens and a drooling tongue. The results are as busy as it is to work here. 10,000 + meals will be served in this hall on an average weekend afternoon. Dedicated cooks work hard and they don't want any leftovers. There's as much work to be done in preparation, market stall banter, tastings, novelty and presentation. All meals are between $5-$10.

• Yellow Chicken, Green Chicken, Red Chicken Thai Curry.. such a difficult choice, I'll take the palm sugar sweetened red, with rice, no noodles and we're back in Khao Lak 1/100th @f3.5 ISO 800

The World on a Plate

If you can't find anything here, (you must have your fussy hat on) there's another 100 Indian & Bangladeshi award winning restaurants on Brick Lane, there's also two famous Beigel shops open 24/7 364 days per year. The beigels come plain in dozen bags or single, split & crammed with whatever you fancy. Salt Beef is a favourite. If that doesn't do it for you, there's another couple of hundred stalls and restaurants around the corner at Spitalfields market or the ever popular Home of Meat Porn trailer somewhere in between at Spitalfields Beach. An artificial sandy refuge in the middle of a city car park, replete with deckchairs and a palm frond cocktail bar ! Beach balls and bikinis not mandatory.

• Your Mum Ate My Meat Porn 1/60th @f4.2 ISO 200

• Fresh and hot, Char Sui STEEMED Pork Buns, a favourite of mine from lunchtimes past working next to Chinatown 1/125th @f4.8 ISO 800

• Couldn't take my eyes of these STEEMED Buns 1/125th @f4.8 ISO 400

• Home style cooked curry, try all three if you fancy, a little of each with rice / & or chapati 1/20th @f5.6 ISO 400

• Home style cooked curry rear view though STEEMED glass 1/60th @@@f3.5 ISO 250

• Hand Crafted Japanese finger food. One of my all time favourites here, tofu pockets.. mmm attention to small detail 1/100th @f3.5 ISO 400

• Hand Crafted Japanese finger food. Rear View through STEEMED glass 1/125th @f3.5 ISO 620

Technical

Jostling crowds, hot, steamy, everything moving, difficult to get a good angle, find space between you and the subject, dark.. It's pretty tricky but capturing that intensity is the challenge. Look, look, look again.. go round and round and see what's going on. Pick your moment. Crank up the ISO inside the dark warehouse. Get the shutter down to catch that STEEM. It's a bit of trial and error, review and select on edit later. Fun type of indoor street photography. People in markets can be wary of photographers but in this location let's face it, everyone's snapping away with phone camera's so what's another lens.. I'll often say "I'll make you an internet sensation" or "this will go viral" that usually elicits a smile from wary subjects. Then there's the incredibly tricky task of actually picking something to eat. I must admit there's a certain type of South East Asian sweet pancake made with rice flour, sticky sweet black rice, condensed milk, coconut and banana and it's just off the scale of good.. cooked in front of your very eyes.