8 food photos to make you hungry for travel - PHOTO

This atmospheric moment, captured in a village in Vietnam by British photographer Tessa Bunney, was awarded the prize for best food photography this week in a competition that attracted more than 6,000 images from around the world.The Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition showcased dozens of entries that showed that some travel photos offer a feast for the stomach as well as the eyes.Among others shortlisted was another image from Vietnam by Australian photographer Tuan Nguyen, showing two women preparing food for the annual Tet feast celebrating lunar new year.Another, by Jonathan Gregson, showed steam rising as a worker roasts coffee beans in Rwanda -- a photograph you can almost smell as well as see.Bunney, who is based in Laos, picked up $8,400 for her noodle-making image.The photographer captured the image while spending six months living with a family in Hanoi as she documented "craft villages" -- centuries-old communities dedicated to the manufacture of one product, such as pottery or silk.Slash and burn landscapesIt shows a woman in the noodle-making center of Huu Tu, a village close to the center of the Vietnamese capital that Bunney says has become badly polluted due to industrialization, even though some still make the noodles by hand."The job she was doing was really repetitive, she did it day after day, for hours on end," she told CNN." Her mom was there feeding her rice as she worked so she didn't have to stop to eat -- so she could keep on going as long as possible."Every village was the same, they worked really long hours for not very much money."Bunney said the mien noodles in the image were made from root flour which is formed on large hotplates into the heavy pancake seen in her photo.Before it dries completely, it is cut into strips -- just one of many ways in which noodles are made in the village.Bunney says her food photography comes from a wider interest in landscape documentation."I'm really interested in agriculture and the different landscapes that come from different farming methods."I'm living in Laos at the moment and there's been a lot of slash-and-burn farming for rice in the lowlands. I'm really interested in the details -- how the landscape makes people farm in different ways."'Politics of food'In Cairo, Italian photographer Sandro Maddalena visited the trash piles of the Egyptian capital's Garbage City -- a slum settlement where mainly Coptic Christians subsist by recycling refuse.His image, which shows dirt-blackened pigs in a sty surrounded by garbage, was presented a "politics of food" award for showing the realities of food production."The competition was intensely fierce," said Andy Macdonald, managing director of competition sponsor Coregeo, a UK-based produce brand marketing company."There were 6,000 images entered internationally and the standard was phenomenal."Tessa's image stood out from the rest, however, for its beautiful composition, the expression of utter absorption on its subject's face, and the capture of a perfect moment in time as the noodle dough flies through the air."(CNN)ANN.Az