Food Photography

What The Duck – By Aaron Johnson – http://whattheduck.net

Transcript

• Box 1: What’s your specialty?
• Box 2: Food photography.
• Box 3: Though cash would be nice too.
• Box 3 (sign): Will shoot 4 food

Vocabulary

• Specialty (n.) /ˌspeʃiˈæləti/ the skill you are good at
  
• Food photography (n. phrase): a sub-field of photography where people take photos of food
• Cash (n.) /kæʃ/ informal term for money
• Though (conj.) /ðəʊ/: used to introduce a fact or opinion that makes the other part of the sentence seem surprising
• Shoot (v.) /ʃuːt/ here: take pictures
  
• 4 (four) = for (informal – see below)

Context

• Professional photographers usually specialize in one type of photography (for example: a wedding photographer would mainly take photographs of weddings, etc). In this comic strip, we would expect that “Food photography” in box 2 refers to that photographer’s specialization, but we then realize in the third box that he  actually just want to take any kind of pictures in exchange for food. Keep in mind that self-employed photographers don’t have regular employment and may meet difficulties to earn enough money at times.
• “for” is often written as 4 on signs, in text messages, etc, to save space. This is non-standard and should be avoided in formal contexts