Amity Fish Company

With one of Scotland’s best-loved Skippers, Jimmy Buchan, at the helm, the Amity Fish Company is well known for its high quality seafood. Jimmy has over 40 years’ experience in the fishing industry and was the star of the BBC’s BAFTA award-winning Trawlermen TV series. As a “foodie” who has sampled Amity seafood at Food and Wine nights, and on many of the best menus, I was delighted to be asked to photograph some of the products.

They were being prepared by the very talented, Chris Ritchie, head chef at the Saplinbrae Hotel.

We started with large shell on langoustines and showed them in the bowl with a glass of white wine, and then went in close.

Amity Fish company is famous for their scampi and a lot of restaurants will proudly offer “Amity scampi” but it is more expensive, and in my opinion, well worth the extra. Jimmy has added another range of scampi, which after tasting it, I can confirm is also excellent but it is more competitively priced for the catering market, and is presented here in a basket.

The scallops with black pudding and apple was beautiful presented with the scallops beautifully cooked by Chris

The next dish was beautiful garlic prawns with crusty bread, and the smell was amazing. It was important to get light into the bowl to show off the prawns

The next dish looked amazing and was going to be Jimmy’s choice later that evening when he was going back to the hotel for dinner. The monkfish was wrapped in parma ham and then fried in breadcrumbs and served with a lemon tartare sauce.

Jimmy was a telling me that the cod fish fingers served in a wrap were designed for a London market where they want to have a good quality lunch but be able to use their phone and eat with one hand.

The last dish was a simple dish with beautiful prawns. With fish this good, often keeping it simple is best.

We finished up with a shot of Jimmy and all the dishes including the famous Cullen Skink.

For the photography, a large radio controlled soft box with a reflector, and also a small flash for selected back lighting. Having the light behind the food and using a reflector gives the food a shine and texture. There was no background used and the lighting allowed the background to go black to make the food the feature. For the shot with Jimmy, we used Photoshop to remove background distraction.

Photographs taken on a Nikon D850 the new Nikon Z7 with the Nikkor 105 f2.8 Macro lens