My project for course: Still Life Photography: Create Conceptual Images

My project for course: Still Life Photography: Create Conceptual Images

For the past couple years, I’ve been obsessed with vintage cookbooks. I love the the glimpse they give of what the ideal was considered to be in any given time period. The rigorous expectations of a hostess and housewife, nutritional guidelines that seem strange to us now, off the wall flavor combinations, and best of all early examples of the emerging fields of food photography and food styling are all so fascinating. About a year ago I went on a thrifting trip with my mom and scored an absolute jackpot of Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks from the late 1950s and early 1960s. My mom noticed how excited I was by this find and mentioned that she had some of her grandmother’s recipes from the same era and would I be interested in those. And, duh, of course I was.

Though I only met her once when I was seven years old and she was nearly 100, I grew up with my mother’s stories of great-grandma Lois. She was a loving safe haven for my mother during her tumultuous childhood, everything the ideal grandma should be. Except for one thing, that is. While her cooking was certainly made with a lot of love, it wasn’t made with a whole lot of flavor. My mom told stories of over cooked lima beans, pancakes that were burnt on the outside and soupy in the middle, and strange jello concoctions. Nevertheless, I was excited to try out her recipes and when I decided to take this class, I knew I needed to use one of her recipes as a jumping off point. I went with her “Pistachio Salad” whose main ingredients are pistachio flavored pudding mix, crushed pineapple, and mini marshmallows.

When I did my mind map, I decided I wanted to create a kind of narrative that had less to do with my great-grandmother and more to do with an imagined character who was hosting a luncheon and really needed to impress her guests.

As I refined my narrative and created a moodboard, I decided to go for a look that was feminine and hinted towards the style of late 50s/early 60s, but wasn’t overly kitchy. During my research, I was somewhat crushed to find out this wasn’t an original great-grandma Lois recipe. It was actually a fairly popular recipe of the time and is also known as Watergate Salad or Green Cloud.

For color palette, I knew the main ingredient in the recipe was pistachio pudding mix which is a kind-of sea foam green. I decided to go with a complimentary color scheme and use pink in the background.

For lighting, I was inspired by the kind of light you would find in the afternoon on the back patio. I used two strobes to achieve this. I used a reflector and grid on the key light to really concentrate the light on my scene and added a CTO gel to warm it up and make it feel more like sunshine. I put a big soft box and a CTB gel on the second light to fill in and cool down the shadows.

When I started to shoot, I got a little frustrated in the beginning because the composition just wasn’t coming together the way I’d envisioned. In my original concept, I wanted there to be underlying tension represented by a knife in the frame and some spills in the background. But these ended up crowding the frame and ultimately just didn’t make sense visually. Maybe if the framing was a little wider and included a bigger scene I could have had more going on (the space I was working in is small so, alas, wider framing wasn’t a possibility) I ended up eliminating that aspect and returning the focus to the dish itself. I’m happy I made that call because I really like the shot I was able to get with a slightly simpler composition. Besides, the dish itself is already lumpy and strange so I don’t know if all the extra stuff is necessary to make the viewer feel uncomfortable.

tl;dr I really enjoyed learning this new process of planning and executing a shoot and I'm super happy with the final shot I was able to get!

Here it is again