Food

Artist Statement

When capturing the unedited image, I was unsure of what food I had around my house at the time. I had been studying for a math test, so I had lined paper and my laptop out on the table. During a study break, I got apple slices for a snack, and it evolved from there: I positioned the food on a place so that most of the space was used and divided fairly evenly, making it balanced. I wanted to capture the food from above because that was where you could most easily see what was on the plate. I then decided not to do a plain background and used what I already had on the table—my materials for studying—to make the image a little more appealing. I positioned the papers underneath the plat and the laptop right next to it so that it took up quite a bit of space on the table. I then took the photo standing on a nearby chair.

My photo editing for the image consisted mostly of spot healing, the dodge and burn tools, and adding layers of color over the image. I also played around with saturation and light within the photos application. In photoshop, I extended the table to the corner of the image where it had cut off and showed the floor of the room using the spot healing tool. I also used this for a placemat that showed at the top of the image. For layering colors over the image, I did mostly brown and made the colors warmer. I wanted the image to feel very relaxed, so I didn’t increase the saturation too much, but I didn’t want to lose all of the color of the food in the image. I cropped the image so that there was fairly equal balance with the objects I had over the table and so that the plate of food still was the focus and subject.

While the image does not connect to my personal concentration, I did enjoy making it. I took the original image while I was studying, so I decided to make the theme of the image revolve around that factor. I’m likely not the only one who gets food during a study break every so often, and I wanted to capture the atmosphere of that few hours of work by stepping outside of it for a while. The image is very specific to the time it was taken rather than representing a broad concept or message: it very much relates to the idea of a photo simply capturing a moment in time. My past few images have relied more heavily on photo edits, but this one was centered around the process of taking the image and the moment that it represents.