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I was recently speaking with my brother, and we got to laughing about how if you look at all the options on the Taco Bell menu, they are basically created with seven ingredients. I got to thinking about how to apply food and photography together. At its most basic, there is not a lot to a photograph, the frame, composition, light, color, gesture, time, etc., but yet there is an infinite number of images that can be created. As I thought more and more about that notion, I realized that how we think and deal with our food is a lot like photography. We have quick shots that don’t really stay with us as memorable (fast food), we have places we like to eat and love the consistency and value (chain restaurants) and then the finer dining or smaller places that make really good food. As we work on our photographs, I think we sort of can put them in similar buckets. This classification can help us better understand our images, our voice, and our style since not every image has to be a four-start restaurant.
I also got to thinking about how we cook at home and how our understanding of baking, cooking and recipes impacts the food we make. There are times when you need to follow the recipe or the cake doesn’t work, and other times the recipe calls for more seasoning to taste. Photography is a lot like that. There are times when following the recipe makes sense and other times, adding your own flavors makes the photograph your own. I also think there is huge value in applying the skill or recipe writing to your photography. Making a list of what was done, in what proportion and the order things are done can really impact what you get in the camera. Having taken the time to write it down and understand what happens when you put the photograph ingredients together could be a big shift in your work.
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