I had a fat little parcel waiting for me at work from play.com today. The general consensus before I split open the parcel was that there was another stack of cookery books awaiting my perusal but much to everyone's surprise they were in fact photography books - gasp! Okay one is a book on digital food photography but it's not actually cookery though saying that it does have some mad recipes for making food-a-likes for photo shoots. For example, a substance that photographs like ice cream but not something you'd want to sneak a spoon of. Nowadays I think the style is for as much gritty realism as possible but I can appreciate professionally shooting ice cream could pose many challenges. There was also an intriguing piece on getting the perfect spoon of cornflakes and capturing that moment that the milk drips off the spoon back it the bowl waiting below. And trust me, you seriously don't want to eat that either.
These are not the sort of pictures I want to take but it makes interesting reading anyway. It's also really fascinating looking at the evolution of food photography especially for magazines. The style in the seventies was to show the featured food item almost totally obscured by a opulently dressed table which in turn is situated in a lavishly velvet and brocade swathed room with candles, flowers, roaring fires, coloured crockery and lots of gold. Nowadays we want clean lines, white crockery, simple images and the food to be the main feature. We want to be salivating and thinking about eating the food and not so much about whether we'd like to live there and warm our toes by the fire.
Now this picture makes me want to run off and eat raspberries, so I think it has achieved what I was aiming for. I look forward to getting some new ideas from reading the rest of the book but now I have to go off in search of raspberries.
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