Mermaid Fish Restaurant, Morley

We have eaten here many times before, and I wrote about it on 21 May 2010 here. It's actually the page on this site that has had the third most views and the most (sensible) responses. Today we both had the small Cod and Chips, with tea or coffee and optional bread and butter. It was extremely fresh, well-cooked and hot. We both enjoyed it very much.

However it was the quality of the photograph I took that has made me want to publish this. Here it is:

It's not an exceptional picture, and has no particular artistic merit. In the course of eating out over the last fifteen years or so I have taken hundreds of photographs using about twenty different cameras and phones of varying degrees of sophistication, four different mini-tripods, and I suppose like many people who treat this as a hobby, I am almost never satisfied with the picture in the end. The lighting isn't usually good enough, you don't want to use flash and you take the picture too quickly to avoid annoying other diners or the chef. 

This one though I took with a Microsoft Lumia 640 LTE, which is a budget phone. It was automatically uploaded to the cloud. I would have expected there to have been some compression of the image at that point. There's a lot of glass at the Mermaid, so the light was good and I managed to keep reasonably still despite taking it quickly. 

Food and restaurant bloggers rarely seem to refer to the difficulties they encounter taking their photographs, yet millions of people do it. Just try typing the name of any food into the Flickr search engine.