Giorgio Cravero

Giorgio Cravero:

Giorgio Cravero was born in 1975 in Turin, where he lives and works. Graduating in Visual Communication at the European Institute of Design, he began his career working as an architectural and still life photographer. In 2012, after having been partner for two years, he fully acquired Studio Blu, one of the oldest and most prestigious still life studios.

Taking a particular interest in food as the subjects of his art Cravero creates pieces that have the appearance of a fruit or vegetable suspended in mid-air. This creative take on typical still life photography has gained him internation recognition in the photography world and has allowed him to work on several big brand campaigns such as the 2016 Pepsi Advertisements.

Image analysis

The subject of this 2015 piece- a bunch of bananas- won him the 2016 Hasselblad Masters prize. Seemingly floating in thin air, the bananas have the appearance of their lurid yellow colour being drained from them. Melting off in drips, the colour has entirely left the topmost section of the bananas entirely absent of colour. This creative way to photograph fruit could be described as surreal, perhaps even fitting into the surrealism art genre. To create this effect Giorgio hung up the edible subjects before dipping them in bright tempera paints and shooting, he then worked on them in post-production; de-saturating, cleaning and adjusting the colour parameters in order to match the colour between the tempera and the objects. This technique is so effective because not only is it a fairly simple concept, but care has been taken in post-production to make the images clean and seamless. Frankly, I’m impressed at the simplicity of the process producing such an inventive final piece. I look forward to recreating Giorgio Cravero’s innovative style.

My Work

Canon Eos 4000D and 18-55mm lens

Here is my very first attempts at recreating Giorgio Cravero's work, a lemon was suspended in mid-air using thread sewn through the top of it, this entire project was such a learning curve, so at this point I wasnt feeling entirely satisfied with the drips created. Furthermore paint kept getting everywhere which made for an imperfect unedited shot that I had to do a lot of editing on.

Before post-production:

Clearly the gradient into grey on the lemon needed some work and I'm not happy with the texture and gradient of the background. But it is a solid start.

I am especially happy with this image although I did unsuccessfully attempt to create a gradient on the top of the pepper.

Editing map: pomegranate

f/5.6 ISO:1000 1/80

For this one I decided to use the original background but just recolour it. I'm happy with the edit in post but I want to improve the resolution and the quality of the raw image in shoot as in this one its a little fuzzy. I also think the composition is not quite right.

The set up

F/4.0 ISO:100 1/40

For these pieces I used chillis, I'm definitely pleased with the first one but in the second the lighting was done poorly so has resulted in a weird shadow. Nevertheless I love the subject of the chilli I think it's so fun. I also like that there are two fruit as this makes a more interesting composition - however the logistics of setting up the shot were very complicated.

At this point I started using a Canon Macro lens EF100mm as I wanted to get higher quality still life photos. This lens has a 1x magification meaning that it will represent the image as life size and in great focus. This is amazing for still life photography where you want capture the texture and detail of the objects.

I also quickly realised that my photos would be better using a tripod, as this gives a much crisper image without the movement of the handshake blurring the image.

New Shots:

Here I tested out the best settings for Aperture and Shutter speed and ISO and also the way I applied the paint.

This was taken at

f/8.0 ISO:320 1/160

f/3.2 ISO:100 1/200

f/2.8 ISO:100 1/125

F/3.2 ISO:100 1/160

f/3.2 ISO:100 1/20

f/2.8 ISO:100 1/125

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