One thing I have to do in developing UVFood is provide photographs of… food. Also restaurants, but they’re relatively easy. It’s the food that’s difficult.

You want photographs of food to look appealing. You want them to look like you’d want to eat the food! But a lot of food photography is just plain awful looking. Delicious, luxurious looking dishes and up looking shiny and flat and alien in photos. Proper lighting is a big thing, but some foods just don’t hold up under the heat of the lights - like ice cream, which is sometimes substituted with mashed potatoes.

A lot of effort goes into the staging of good food photography, but once you have the photos, even if they’re not lit or staged well, there are probably still adjustments you can do to improve them.

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I haven’t done much with UVFood in the last few weeks. Partly because we were traveling for two weeks, but we’ve been back for a while now.

The main reason is that I’ve been doing the dreaded refactoring of the code.

I’ve used Catalyst as the framework for building the web app. Catalyst apps use the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, and application builders often fall into the trap of having too thin a Model and putting too much of the work into the Controller.

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