They call me The Assassin...
My shooting method is pretty plain and straight forward – shoot to “kill” on first sight! No misses.
In my humble suburban home I am the marksman-housewife in disguise.
Only few close friends of mine know in what predicament I live and work.
I have two very imaginative, energetic and artistic girls. They are part of everything I do and breathe and doing food photography is inevitably part of their life. They can’t have it any other way. I always allow them to be part of my creative work – let them hold the reflector, play with styling and even have the first 5 minutes to shoot their own photos of the setting from my camera. My oldest girl likes to arrange the food. My little girl likes to sit under the tripod as if this is a tipi Indian tent. All I have to do is shouting “Hold!” before I press the button and then they are back to their normal mischievous activities...
Most of my shots are the final product of what and how I dream them. I previsualise them, I sketch them with words or drawings, or I just throw in my notebook words as a chain of lexical-semantic network and trying to draw out of it what mood has been lurking under my deepest thoughts and feeling.
Then the moment of shooting comes. And this is the time I am as a trained and briefed special operations soldier on a mission. I have it in my head. I know how it has to look. It has to be done with military precision. And I have only 30 minutes to cook, set, plate, style, shoot and clean. With a bit of luck, if the girls are watching TV, I don’t have to let them be stylists and photographers, but I always have to allow for that spare 5 minutes. I don’t have room for mistakes or re-shoots.
Yep, they call me The Assassin and I cook, style and “shoot to kill”.
Until my next post!
Ciao,
Sophia
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