1st year, Luke Squelch photographs a series of food and drink inspired still life images for the Personal Portfolio.
26th May 2020
At the start of the module, my plan was to explore set design through the different eras. However, due to the current circumstances this was out of my reach because of the unavailability of building materials. After a think, I had decided to look into minimalistic product photography shot on different coloured plain backgrounds. This was my direction until week 6’s formative feedback, where I was made aware that my ideas didn’t fully meet the brief as there was no clear narrative between my chosen products.
I returned to the drawing board which led me to the idea of commercial food and drink photography. I thought of pairing five food images with five drink images on contrasting background colours. This idea still allowed me to be creative with compositions but ensured I showed a much clearer narrative across the series. After some research into James Day’s still life work, I was influenced to show a common feature throughout all my images, which was a human hand. Performing a different action across the series, I feel it adds perspective and another creative element to the images.
From sketching up all ten images beforehand, I had a good guide to shooting each one across the two weeks I allocated for production. All images required post production (Photoshop) to some extent but this mainly focused on cleaning up the backgrounds and the torn holes my model’s hand comes through.
