Chefs Are Going To Hate This: A Portable Photo Studio For Restaurant Instagramming
As if pausing one's restaurant meal to snap a few photos wasn't potentially aggravating enough for some dinner companions — not to mention chefs who seethe from the kitchen as plates of their food go cold — South Africa's MWEB WiFi network just introduced something that's bound to be more divisive than talking politics at the table: a portable photo station that lets amateur food photographers take studio-like snapshots right there at the restaurant.
Currently the placemat-sized setup, which goes by the modern-day moniker #dinnercam, is undergoing a soft opening phase at Cape Town's El Burro restaurant, where diners who upload the hashtagged photos to their various social networking sites receive free prints of their images. See it in action below.
American chefs, breathe. So far #dinnercam is only available in South Africa — however this does raise more questions about the issue of food photography's place at the dinnertable, specifically, what's acceptable and what's taking it too far. Most of us have been guilty of documenting what we eat at some point or another, but where do we draw the line — with ourselves and our dining companions?
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