I’ve chosen Joanie Simon (@thebiteshot) as my photographer to imitate for the Mimesis project. As I mentioned last week, I’m pretty interested in food photography so I thought that I would give her a go. She photographs a bit of everything from sweets to cocktails to fruits and veg and she also has a YouTube channel where she gives advice on things like what lighting to use and what compositions are best. I also found this article that I often referred back to throughout this whole process which provides twenty things to consider when trying to shoot an interesting food photograph. They included mood, repetition, lines, patterns, balance, movement, motion, scale, texture, negative space, odd numbers, colour, human touch, shine, close-up, food portraiture, layers, selective focus, backlighting and flatlay. So basically a lot! Which was very overwhelming to begin with so I decided to narrow down my choices of photos I wanted to imitate and then go from there. These are the five I chose.
For the first two, I needed to create mood so I used two big pieces of black paper to make a box like set and then played around with different angles to create low-key lighting. I had put a piece of white crepe paper over the lamp to soften the light which I think made a massive impact and then played around with different objects so that I could get the light to only shine through a tiny crack to try and create a more dramatic effect. I think out of all my photos, these ones were the most challenging. I struggled to find a nice balance in my composition for the chocolate photo and they toyed around with added some foil to create a bit more texture to the photo but I don’t think I’ve succeeded. My photo with the beaters would have been a lot more dynamic if I could have capture the movement of the chocolate sauce using slower shutter speed however, I had decided to use my iPhone to take the photos and the app I downloaded to use for manual mode, Halide, did not take very well to the dark lighting and I struggled to adjust it. So to make up for my lack of movement, I decided to create more of a background with the use of sugar and a measuring cup.
I really enjoyed shooting the three high-key lighting photos however and I think my egg shot is my favourite of the five I’ve imitated. I used a dark chopping board and juxtaposed it with bright white bowls and directed my light to shine directly into the egg yolk to get a reflection. I also tried to balance the photo with the different shaped bowls. For the cocktail photo, I decided to work with green instead of pink because I had limes and mint to use up and tried to work with the negative space but found that my photos lacked depth. So to fix that, I added some cocktail utensils in the background and scattered some lime wedges and mint around to create a bit more of a story and create balance. For my baking tray shot, I made some blueberry muffins and worked with repetition and colour to create a better shot. It was initially a wider shot but when editing I decided to crop it to add tension so the composition. I edited in Lightroom Classic but only made small adjustments to the light effects to enhance the contrast and exposure and to with the highlights and shadows.
On reflection, I really enjoyed to process of taking these shots and playing around with different lighting techniques and composition layouts. One of the biggest challenges at the end of it was sifting through all of the photos to find the ones I liked and I though stood out the most.