Hi Xav, I was looking at your work on your website and couldn’t understand why, in some of your dish photos, you chop the top and/or bottom of the plates, is this on purpose or accidental? I don’t know why but I like the idea.
Thank you so much first of all for looking at my work. I hope you liked what you see and I’m very happy that you spotted a gimmick like this one!
To answer your question, It is totally intentional to chop the top of the plates. It annoys people! It also starts a conversation like it did with this post. But mostly, I do it to have fun and change things a bit with my work and with shots that are too cliche like this overhead angle so commonly used in food photography.
Constantly I try “tricks” like this and if they work, I’ll add them to my style. It’s my visual language, my style if you like to say. I try them out of curiosity at times and out of necessity most of them. I think they add artistic value to your work. I’ve always thought of myself as a photographer first and an artist second.
I’m not trying to re-invent food photography, so I’m not saying chopping photos is my idea. I grabbed it from a portrait photographer who said that sometimes it’s better to chop a headshot above the eyebrows because there is nothing interesting in the forehead or something like that. So the same applies to food photos, sometimes there’s too much empty space that it doesn’t really matter where you crop as long as your composition is interesting, original and personal.
Have you got any tricks and gimmicks in your style of shooting? Let me know in the comments below.
