IN PROGRESS

I am learning quite a few useful tips in Néstor Daniel Pérez Molière‘s food photography class (by StrudelmediaLive), but also that proper food photography will never be my thing. It is so fiddly and time consuming and involves moving things around and then having to put them back afterwards. Also, props that I find ugly seem to be almost a requirement – multi-coloured plates, cut-glass bowls, crumpled up pieces of paper and textiles, and worst of all, ingredients that are arranged in ways that are messy and bound to involve a certain amount of waste, and I have zero tolerance towards food waste. I find it immoral and unethical. I am also at an age where I am getting rid of things and am definitely not prepared to buy new stuff like studio lights or lightboxes or anything else that I might then use once and then store in the basement.

(But since, as we all know, you have a principle until you don’t, I did buy a set of acrylic plates, one white and one black, and used the black one to take photos for this week’s assigment in Kai McBride’s photography shake up course, which is triptychs. Whether I will ever use it, or the white one again, remains to be seen).

For the next food photography assignment, we are supposed to invite somebody for an evening of cooking and take a load of environmental photos showing the process of cooking. ???? In a pandemic. I don’t meet with people, certainly not indoors. Of course before Corona I used to know lots of people who would happily come round for a home-cooked meal, but I don’t know anybody here who like to cook – except one Indian person, and we have talked about getting together to cook for a group of people, but that will have to wait til Covid19 has gone, to the extent that it will ever go away.

I live in Germany, so I don’t even know anybody who wants to be photographed. I myself certainly do not want to be photographed, and I am not German. The photos would feed into our final project, but if I make a final project, which I doubt, it will just be a post here, and there is no way I would put a photo of myself on my website. The whole assignment seems a little absurd to me. I might just take a back seat for the rest of the course which is starting to bore me anyway. (This is not the teacher’s fault – it is the subject that bores me, all the setting up and staging of photos, which I should have realised before signing up).

We have had quite a lot of rain this week so I have had to find things to photograph at home for the triptychs for the photography shake-up course.

Actually I think I prefer this one instead of the first pumpkin triptych:

And for this one, I needed to introduce more than three images. I don’t know what it is called when there are six images:

This one did not go at all the way I had imagined it in my head. I should probably just take the middle one out and make it a diptych: