Heinz Soups

Okay... I've been gone for a while. No excuses, I just didn't have anything exciting to share. I did a job for Del Monte where I basically poured out the contents of their cans in a bowl and then did the same with their competitor's cans of food. That way they could compare what the consumer saw and not what the food stylist could create. I guess it was valuable to the company, but it was pretty boring to shoot. And then I had a bunch of environmental portraits, which wasn't too bad. I did get a few good shots out of that, but I never got around to posting them. Maybe later...

The shoot today was for Heinz soups. The tough part about this job was trying to match the lighting of some other photographer. That's a hard thing to do, but at the the same time, something that's very educational. There's a guy here in Pittsburgh that's a really good shooter, but his technique is very different than mine. Today, I learned a lot about how he does what he does. I had to imitate it. You'd be surprised at how much you can learn when you have to imitate another photographer's style. The good thing is that you can take what you want from what you've learned and then ignore the rest. Back when I was teaching at the Art Institute, I would suggest that my students copy, as exactly as they could, a photo they liked. Some people thought that this was a little unorthodox, but I thought (and still think) that it's a great way to learn. Sure, you can't continue to copy all your life, but it's a great way to figure out different techniques.

Gotta go. Tomorrow, Mitchell's Fish market! I love the "shootie bootie" from those shoots!

:+)