black and white-ish food photography
Photography projects have been something I’ve heard about since I first started shooting - the idea being you take a subject, concept or theme that will challenge you, and create a series of photos in your own time, to improve your skills and flex your creative muscles. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been itching to start one of my own, with zero pressure or due date, just to have a little side project for myself. Thankfully, I had some inspiration to draw on.
I’ve been following the work of Rachel Korinek from Two Loves Studio for a while now, having taken her courses on Composition Essentials and Lightroom Magic, and man, everything she does, I’m just obsessed with. She started a black and white food photo series, long before I had ever picked up my camera, and I discovered it long after she had finished. Those photos are still stunning, and were incredibly inspiring to a still clueless beginner. I couldn’t get over how creative she was, between her choice of foods and props, her editing skills and her ability to create minimalist shots that spoke volumes. As I continued getting better at photography, the idea of a black and white photo series had always been at the back of mind as something I wanted to try myself, but never found the time or confidence to try myself.
Then, more recently, Moriah Brooke, a New York based photographer, endeavored to do a similar series on her Instagram back in March of this year. She wasn’t quite as strict about her colour story as Rachel was, but instead shooting ‘food [that] has all been chosen, cooked, and styled to maintain natural black and white hues’ (caption from this post). Again, I was floored by the creativity of her choices, and the stories she crafted from a small set of photographs. So after seeing Moriah’s take on this theme, I felt a little bit more confident to try and create some black and white food photos of my own.
The reason I was so intrigued by this concept is because colour is such an integral part of food photography. When you think about it, food is rarely devoid of colour, and it’s hard to imagine it without it. So I really wanted to push myself and think a little more outside the box than I had ever done before with my photography. I’m calling it my ‘black and white-ish’ series, because evidently, it’s not clear cut black and white vibes. There’s rich brown, a little bit of grey and lots of off-white tones happening in these images, but I’m in love with all of them. I couldn’t bring myself to remove every bit of colour from these images - they would have looked so boring! Hence the name. I actually went back and re-edited photos from months ago to test out some new things in Lightroom just for fun - a.k.a. the croissants and millionaire’s squares.
