My aim with this project is to use light and
shadow to abstract food items and ingredients so that their images no
longer reflected their original functions.
The choice to use food objects came from the reactions I
had when walking through a supermarket past the fresh produce and bakery
sections. I found that when looking at the produce my first and only reaction
was one of hunger and how I could transform the ingredients before me into a
tasty meal, and thought that anyone who viewed images of food would think the
same. Consequently I want to attempt transforming or abstracting these
ingredients so that not only their images were changed but a viewers reaction
to them.
My intention is to present each object with a combination of coloured lighting, low
exposure, shadowing and long exposures to achieve abstractions of
transformations to varying ends. I really like the images from Sian Bonnell’s series “Scenic
Cookery”, the narrative of which is very similar to the concept I'm trying to achieve, and a lot of the techniques she has used in her images I will try to use for images of my own.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liamgilbertsondesign/sets/72157631832465029/
For my first shoot, I tried using both natural lighting and low-level studio lighting for my images. For the broccoli photos I found that the images where I tried transforming the heads of broccoli into a forest worked best with the natural lighting, as a forest would usually be lit by natural lighting so it worked well for my transformation. The photos which worked best for this were also the ones where I only caught small parts of each piece of broccoli in the shot, as that was how trees would often be photographed in nature if you were in a forest, and it didn't immediately give away that it was broccoli in the photographs.
The low lighting for the broccoli I felt worked quite well, to me the shots looked quite eerie and organic, maybe like you might see in a scene out of Alien where some creature had created a nest. I also think that it was best to keep the lighting the same way without applying any colour filters to the light or the lens so that it would maintain that organic feeling.
The low-light photo of the egg came out really well, though I originally intended it to look like lunar eclipse, but because of the kind of glass that I had it on also refracted the light a lot it didn't come out with the ring of light quite as I had intended it to.
As for the fennel bulb photographs, I feel there is still work to be done. I like how the lighting outlines parts of the object in a 2-dimensional way so that it doesn't necessarily give away what the object is, and I feel like it's a kind of alien spaceship that just landed, or like a agricultural water-tank at night, though I still want to investigate more angles of this setup. I think the lighting for it seems to be okay though.
For my second shoot, I like the angles I took for the fennel photos, and I thought that setting the image up so that it only caught certain parts of the fennel bulb abstracted the bulb even further, which I liked.
For the second attempt at abstracting the fennel bulb (after hacking the inside of it out and gluing it to retain it's shape) I thought it looked quite like a heart, so I tinted it red to look like one, which I felt worked really well. But because it lacked context, I decided to mask it onto a human. I only wanted the outline of a person just enough so that the position and colour of the fennel bulb indicated that it was a heart. The result of this was what I felt was the strongest image of my set yet.
As I needed another abstraction of an egg, I decided this time to open up the egg so that I could abstract the internals. I pulled out the yolk and fashioned an egg so that I could shine a light up through it and somehow suspend the yolk in the middle so that it was lit from below. Unfortunately I found that the egg yolk wasn't translucent enough when it was cooked to let the light through, so I instead cut the yolk into pieces and photographed it from above so that it would retain the same shape. This I felt worked really well, though my depth of field was too low to get both the egg and the shell in focus.
For my third shoot, I intended to clean up the technical mistakes that I had from the first two shoots, and involve another fruit; the capsicum.
Ever since I was a child, I've always wanted to turn capsicums into a traffic light. I mean, just look at the colours of them. I couldn't help myself. So even if it came out as an image that didn't work so well for my set, I've at least satisfied one of my childhood dreams.
I was tempted to photoshop the traffic light image onto an actual traffic light pole, but I thought it was obvious enough from the image alone that it was what I had intended, and maybe putting the image into a context would have detracted from the image itself so I decided against it.
I found that the image I had done with the egg with the lighting from below had worked really well, so I decided to do the same thing for the seed-head of a capsicum. I felt this abstraction worked really well, as it was really hard to work out what it was for many people, and it looked like so many different things as well, like a brain for example.
For my first shoot, I tried using both natural lighting and low-level studio lighting for my images. For the broccoli photos I found that the images where I tried transforming the heads of broccoli into a forest worked best with the natural lighting, as a forest would usually be lit by natural lighting so it worked well for my transformation. The photos which worked best for this were also the ones where I only caught small parts of each piece of broccoli in the shot, as that was how trees would often be photographed in nature if you were in a forest, and it didn't immediately give away that it was broccoli in the photographs.
The low lighting for the broccoli I felt worked quite well, to me the shots looked quite eerie and organic, maybe like you might see in a scene out of Alien where some creature had created a nest. I also think that it was best to keep the lighting the same way without applying any colour filters to the light or the lens so that it would maintain that organic feeling.
The low-light photo of the egg came out really well, though I originally intended it to look like lunar eclipse, but because of the kind of glass that I had it on also refracted the light a lot it didn't come out with the ring of light quite as I had intended it to.
As for the fennel bulb photographs, I feel there is still work to be done. I like how the lighting outlines parts of the object in a 2-dimensional way so that it doesn't necessarily give away what the object is, and I feel like it's a kind of alien spaceship that just landed, or like a agricultural water-tank at night, though I still want to investigate more angles of this setup. I think the lighting for it seems to be okay though.
For my second shoot, I like the angles I took for the fennel photos, and I thought that setting the image up so that it only caught certain parts of the fennel bulb abstracted the bulb even further, which I liked.
For the second attempt at abstracting the fennel bulb (after hacking the inside of it out and gluing it to retain it's shape) I thought it looked quite like a heart, so I tinted it red to look like one, which I felt worked really well. But because it lacked context, I decided to mask it onto a human. I only wanted the outline of a person just enough so that the position and colour of the fennel bulb indicated that it was a heart. The result of this was what I felt was the strongest image of my set yet.
As I needed another abstraction of an egg, I decided this time to open up the egg so that I could abstract the internals. I pulled out the yolk and fashioned an egg so that I could shine a light up through it and somehow suspend the yolk in the middle so that it was lit from below. Unfortunately I found that the egg yolk wasn't translucent enough when it was cooked to let the light through, so I instead cut the yolk into pieces and photographed it from above so that it would retain the same shape. This I felt worked really well, though my depth of field was too low to get both the egg and the shell in focus.
For my third shoot, I intended to clean up the technical mistakes that I had from the first two shoots, and involve another fruit; the capsicum.
Ever since I was a child, I've always wanted to turn capsicums into a traffic light. I mean, just look at the colours of them. I couldn't help myself. So even if it came out as an image that didn't work so well for my set, I've at least satisfied one of my childhood dreams.
I was tempted to photoshop the traffic light image onto an actual traffic light pole, but I thought it was obvious enough from the image alone that it was what I had intended, and maybe putting the image into a context would have detracted from the image itself so I decided against it.
I found that the image I had done with the egg with the lighting from below had worked really well, so I decided to do the same thing for the seed-head of a capsicum. I felt this abstraction worked really well, as it was really hard to work out what it was for many people, and it looked like so many different things as well, like a brain for example.
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