The Foodie

One of the really good things about the Advanced Diploma in Photography (at least when I did it) was that there was a focus on commercial photography and as such we had assignments which required us to do all sorts of photography, things we would most likely have never done ourselves.

One of the things we had to do was food photography. And I've just scanned the crap I took back in the day.

We had to do a cover shot for a magazine.

I invented a magazine called "grub", subtitle 'hearty food for beefy blokes' (or something like that). It was a bit of a pisstake. So was the cover image.

One thing we weren't told however was that the vast majority of food photography is done using natural light not studio lights - at least these days anyway. I got marks off for my horribly wilted parsley.

Regardless, the day of the shoot I was a lot more excited about another concept I came up with the night before. Sadly, a week earlier we had to do a proposal which we weren't allowed to change. I took the photos anyway.


That top shot is still about the best thing I've ever done in a studio.

One of the really good things about the Advanced Diploma in Photography (at least when I did it) was that we actually had commercial/professional working photographers as tutors - people who had real world experience in editorial or portrait or studio.

This shot was for a different part of the same assignment. As I was setting it up the tutor starting throwing ideas at me like how I could put up a light here and make a gobo to replicated window light/shadow, and have another light here acting as light leeching through an ajar door and .....

And I stood there going "um ... this is like only my second time in the studio and I'm not really comfortable with doing this shot simply, let alone complicating up the way you're suggesting".

Suffice to say I have done complicated up shots with that same photographer, and numerous others, since.