Prime Lenses & Bagels: FUJIFILM X-T2, Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company

Several years ago, a news article in the satirical newspaper, The Onion, stated that every resident of New York City had spontaneously decided to leave immediately. The article stated, “… living in a dingy, grime-caked apartment while exhaust fumes from an idling truck seep through your bedroom window isn’t worth slightly bigger bagels.” Well, if you go to one of Brooklyn Bagel and Coffee Company’s (BBCC) locations in Queens and Manhattan, you will find that the hassles and inconveniences of New York City are a small price to pay for their gigantic and delicious bagels.

Photographs © Todd Vorenkamp

BBCC’s bagels have graced many “Best Bagel” lists—often at the top—by NY1, BuzzFeed, New York Eater, Thrillist, Gothamist, and more. But, fair warning, with great bagels come great lines. Sometimes, the line can wrap around a New York City block.

B&H Photo braved the queue of bagel lovers and put the FUJIFILM X-T2 and a battery of prime lenses through their paces in an attempt to make photographs that look as good as the circular Brooklyn Bagel masterpieces taste.

Brooklyn Bagel History

Civil engineers Panos Voyiatzis and John Rocchio founded Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company, in 2002, after leaving the heavy construction business. Voyiatzis’s family has a history in the restaurant business, reaching back more than a century—the tuna and chicken salad they sell at the stores today is a family recipe from his father. Voyiatzis and Rocchio met at New York Polytechnic University, as classmates, after Rocchio’s service in the US Navy as an aircraft mechanic.

Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company started with the first storefront, on Broadway, in Astoria, in the borough of Queens. Today, the operation consists of one commissary that makes bagels for their five stores. The bagels are hand-rolled daily in the commissary and then delivered to the shops. Every single bagel they sell was formed by hand and, because of this, the Brooklyn Bagel logo gives a glimpse into the process.

The idea for kettle-boiled bagels, according to Voyiatzis, comes from the original process that Polish bakers used many years ago. Boiling the bread before baking gives it the signature texture of a bagel, when compared to other breads.

How are they made?

Voyiatzis describes the Brooklyn Bagel-making process from start to finish. First, he says, “It all starts with procuring the best ingredients available for the product you are creating for your guests, neighbors, friends, and family. This is by far the most important step.” With the ingredients, they make the dough—what he refers to as the “gestation period” of the bagel. “This step must be handled by the most experienced and professional eyes available to you. During this stage, constant examining occurs over a specific time in a controlled environment.”

The dough is then hand-rolled and stored at a cold temperature for a period before baking. “I consider this the character-building step. Much of the bagel's flavor and texture is developed in this stage,” says Voyiatzis.

Then, the bagels are dropped into the boiling water of a large stainless kettle, right next to the oven. “This is the step that traps all the beauty our bagel has to offer, inside our bagel, so it doesn't escape during baking.”

After a bit, the bagels are fished out of the kettle with a stainless basket and readied for the oven. This is where the toppings like poppy and sesame seeds are applied by dunking into a pool of seeds. Voyiatzis says that the plain bagel is “by far” the most popular. [As a plain bagel fan, you all (coworkers and family) can stop making fun of my choices now!]

The ovens are custom-made for bagel cooking. The boiled bagels, still steaming, are put onto single-row trays and placed on a shelf in the revolving tray oven that takes the bagels for a ride on the world’s hottest Ferris wheel. After a lap or two, the trays are flipped—flipping the bagels—and then pulled out and reloaded with the next batch as the newly flipped bagels continue their oven tour.

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As important as the initial stages of the bagel-making process are, the baking is crucial to the success of the bagel, as well. Brooklyn Bagel’s bakers are veterans of the industry. One has been with the company since the first day the company opened. The bakers, says Voyiatzis, “know precisely what final product our company wants to achieve and offer to our customers.”

In the Chelsea location, Brooklyn Bagel uses a Picard Oven, made in Canada. The oven has been going strong for 11 years. As happy as the company is with the Picard oven, Voyiatzis fondly remembers the Cutler rotating tray ovens of years past— “the Cadillac of bagel-making ovens,” he says. Unfortunately out of business, Cutler’s hallmark was consistent reliability and low maintenance. “This is the oven that I believe most current companies strive to be like,” he says. Brooklyn Bagel’s most recent ovens are made by Fish, in Illinois, and they are happy with the product.

Why Brooklyn in name but not in location?

If you looked up Brooklyn Bagel’s five locations, you may have noticed that there are not any storefronts in the borough of Brooklyn. Why “Brooklyn Bagel,” then? Voyiatzis says that the Brooklyn mention in the name is “a way to pay homage to the early Jewish settlers that brought over with them what became the ‘New York City’ bagel—some people believe it all began in Brooklyn.”

The Photography Gear

For the Brooklyn Bagel shoot, I employed the FUJIFILM X-T2 APS-C mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera and a small battery of prime Fujinon lenses—XF 14mm f/2.8 R, XF 23mm f/1.4 R, workhorse 35mm f/1.4 XF R, XF 56mm f/1.2 R, and the XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR.

The small size and diminutive weight of the X-T2 is ideal for documentary work in tight spaces. The Chelsea location of Brooklyn Bagels is their largest but, even though I was trying to stay out of the way, the area behind the counter and near the oven was tight. Sure, I could have managed with a bigger camera, but smaller is better, in this case.

Dramatically lit to showcase the bagels and cream cheese, it is a bit dark in the shop, and the counter and kitchen are far from the storefront windows. I know from experience that the X-T2 can easily produce virtually noise-free images at ISO 800 and for the “action” shots, I even bumped up to ISO 1600. I was also impressed with the X-T2’s autofocus performance. I had a few misses here and there, but likely not more than I would have with a DSLR. The face and eye detection worked very well throughout the shoot, although some bagels make faces that only the X-T2 sees.

There is something about the FUJIFILM X system that makes me want to shoot prime lenses. As nice as the XF 18-55 f/2.8-4 R LM OIS lens would have been for this shoot, with the less-than-bright lighting, I knew I wanted to have a few more stops of aperture available for light gathering, forgoing the 18-55’s image stabilization. Also, shallow depth of field seems to be the rage in most food photography, and I wanted to be able to go wider than f/2.8 when needed.

Most lens manufacturers claim terrific “wide-open” performance and sharpness. But, in real life, we all know that sharpness suffers when the apertures are dialed to their maximum openings. Fujinon lenses are no exception to the challenges of physics but, in my experience, they are as sharp as any given lens when opened up and they ditch that limited softness very quickly as the aperture is clicked down a stop or two. You can see some great wide-open center sharpness in some of the images illustrating this article.

B&H Photo would like to thank the owners of Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company and the employees of their Chelsea, New York, location for their generous hospitality.

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