Throughout the module I had quite the hard time in finding a style that would look both unique and interesting. What was more, I had a hard time explaining to my parents that I am doing a university assignment and I am not going to ruin the food.
When I was very little, Bulgaria was undergoing a terrible political and economic crisis which resulted in high inflation and food shortages. My parents and grandparents have spent hours queuing for basic products and I remember having to eat bean soup for days even weeks on end. As a result of this, food is never wasted in my family - we never cook more than we can eat and edible food doesn't get thrown away. Hence, the very idea of me 'wasting' some ingredients for the sake of a single picture made my parents quite worried.
To prove that I am not going to waste the ingredients (which were then 'recycled' into a dish), I had to do some things to make sure that the ingredient would not be wasted. Unlike Irving Penn, who (from what I saw) went to some extremes with the food he used in his images, I had to comply to certain rules. Rule 1 - do not waste food - that meant that I cannot place a food item on a dirty surface. It was extremely important for food items such as minced meat (below) or eggs. In the ideal case, I would have broken the egg for the composition (similar to what Penn would do) but that would have meant that a single egg could be ruined for a single image and I didn't think my parents would let me do that. Besides, I also think that wasting so many eggs would not have been that much of a good idea.
This is why some of the ingredients are set in spoons, glasses, etc. - because I wanted to make sure I would be able to reuse them for the next shot and then use them in cooking as well.
Throughout the module, I had to change the background. My initial idea was to use a rock cutting board for a backdrop and that mean the composition was too tight, almost no negative space available around the subjects since the board was too small. That made me take pics from one angle - right from above - and this made images look too similar:
Peers advised me to use coloured backdrop for my images and that proved to be a great idea. I used to colour wheel to select the colour that would make all ingredients in the image pop up. I also tried to arrange the ingredients in different angles to emphasize on texture, colour and shape.
This whole new experience proved to be quite interesting since I experimented (and played with food. something I have been continuously told not to do) more than ever before. The most experimental image was this:
In it, I depicted traditional Bulgarian barbeque - kebapcheta and kiufteta as a part of a very popular game (the name escapes me right now).
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