Big Smoke at the SmokeBox

Yesterday was our 5th visit to a local food truck called SmokeBox. While this sounds like an awful lot of visits,  they have taken place over a period of more than 3 months.

They make the best tasting burgers, and they're also very big and filling. They must be half-pounders, and we can fill up on about a half burger. They do cook other specials too, such as the chicken parmesan that we once ordered. It was also fab did us for 2 meals.

We normally, order the Swiss Mushroom burger, which is quite wonderful, but they had a special burger recently, a maple, apple chutney and brie concoction, that has to be the best that I have ever tasted. When I commended them on that burger yesterday, they said that it may go on the standard menu very soon.

It is not a chip (fry) truck, but we order the pineapple claw as a side, and it is also fabulous. There aren't actual pineapple bits in the slaw (thank goodness) but the taste is drizzled in somehow. Yum.

I wanted to take a specific photo, which I will get to, but I'll begin with the truck itself.

The cooking is done through a window on the left side ↑ that you can't see ↑ so I took a photo from the side. ↓ As you can see, the cook sticks his head through the window to access the smoker. It is a job for a good, young back.

At first ↑ the smoker wasn't yet smoking as much as I had seen previously, but I got this ↓ next photo from the front side a bit later. It was the photo that I had wanted all along although it isn't a good as I thought it might be. It does capture what I wanted however – The Big Smoke, as it were.

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There was a question about RAW photos on the previous post. This is my answer for those who are interested, which I don't expect will be everybody.

Think of a RAW photo as a negative. You have to develop a negative into a print. But you would also have to develop it to share online. (I know that you would probably scan the print to share, but stick with me.)

With most point and shoot cameras and phone camera, you are presented with a developed image in jpeg format. The camera has made a decision about how to process the image into a final product. That's it. Whatever other information that was gathered from the sensor is then discarded.

More sophisticated cameras, offer the photographer the option of shooting in RAW format. The photo editing program will give you a basic interpretation of of the photo, but the photographer almost invariably has to push the partially developed result a little further. 

Fortunately, the RAW image contains all of the original data that went to the sensor in the first place; no data is discarded. Was the scene brighter than what you see on the screen. It is easily adjustable, Is the colour not quite correct? You can fix that too.

It's not that you can't edit a standard jpeg image; of course you can. But it is more limiting without all of the RAW data, and you can degrade the quality more easily.

Most serious photographers, therefore, shoot in this RAW mode most of the time. Sometimes, they will choose to have the camera save both versions. A football photographer, for example, may want to get their images to the publisher very quickly at halftime and not have time to fiddle with processing. However, they may also keep the RAW version to work on later if they, personally, plan to take the image to print.