Kind of Makes Me Hungry

Sushi

Shooting food is always a challenge. Since I am working with real food, not some sophisticated facsimile, I get hungry and want to eat the set. Fortunately, I can wait until I get the shot and then eat. The sushi to the right was my lunch today. I shot it as a sample and not for any specific client.

The sushi came from Sushi Station, a sushi restaurant in Elgin, IL. At Sushi Station customers sit in front of a big, sophisticated conveyor belt with food on it. When the customer sees something he or she likes one simply opens the door and takes the food. The plates are color coded so that in the end the plates are counted and the bill prepared. So Simple.

I really liked the colors of the individual rolls. I knew I was going to use the green divided plate and wanted something the would go along with the plate. Placing the whole thing on the maroon mat gave separation to the plate and picked up on the colors of the food as well. I like the shot.

Asparagus

The asparagus spears to the left were also shot today as a sample. When I saw the bunch in the market I was struck by the one spear that was leaning over to the right. I thought, “What a picture that would make!” I lit this image with a single soft light directly overhead and a single honeycombed light 4 stops under the overhead softbox aimed at the mottled backdrop. The backlight offered great separation of the asparagus from the background wile the softbox light caressed the asparagus like an intimate friend.

I shot a few vertical versions of this but finally settled on the horizontal because I believe it carries a certain visual strength that the vertical does not have. It is not ordinary, rather, it reaches upward in a space that projects gravity, weight, confinement. The horizontal fixes one’s attention on the color and strength of the raw asparagus without compromise.

Both of these images are available as royalty free stock images licensed for unlimited electronic media use at Roger Passman Stock Photography.

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