This exercise is all about the use of the imagination and presenting work in a creative way.
Taking the photograph, or a series of images can be the first step in the creative process, then possibly moving into Photoshop to work on endless possibilities within. At this moment in my photographic development I prefer to try to make my creations through the lens of the camera, i.e. at source. There are many ways or styles or even genre of creative works, and one photographer that used perspective (particularly with the human form) to create abstractions very effectively was Bill Brandt https://eledhwen.blog/bill-brandt/
Below is a screengrab of a search I did on ‘Google Images’ for ‘Cup of coffee’.
By and large all of the pictures are the same. The cup, filled with coffee is the mainstay of all of the pictures, with many having a gimmick picture in the froth on top. Having looked through four screens of coffee, this is by far the commonest type of image.
What strikes me the most about these images is how static they are. They all lack dynamicism. I wanted to create some images that really drew attention to themselves.
My first thoughts were to go back to an earlier exercise (3.1) and photograph a cup of coffee being dropped from a height, and record what happens to the liquid in conjunction with the solid state of the cup. I quickly realised that this was going to prove to be very messy and also expensive the more times I had to shoot it to get it right. A little bit of lateral thinking produced this image below. As the cup and coffee were always going to be in the lower quarter of the image, I have deliberately left the head of the model out of the image so as not to detract the attention from the coffee. There were a few dummy runs to get the timing right before the ‘one off’ take. It was especially hard as I was the model and therefore had to shoot remotely!! Unfortunately the hand is a little high and makes the image quite unbalanced/unstable and jarring on the eye. That said, this image goes back to first principles and proves that a ‘point’ can be very powerful within an image, given the relative size of the cup within the frame is quite small.
The following shot seems simple to set up, but I had to experiment with a number of water repellant materials to get this image. I started by using a thick water resistant marine grease. This was a bit too dark, and detracted from the contrast and obscured things slightly. Next I tried WD40 which was quite hard to control, so I soaked some tissue with it and tried writing with the ‘nib’ of the tissue. This was the result. In this image the two main constituents have been separated (the coffee & the cup) yet because they are so intrinsically linked it is seen as ‘a cup of coffee’.
I also had an idea which would have been so much easier to recreate through the use of Photoshop, but was so much more rewarding to set up and shoot.
All seems straight forward, if a little quirky, but pan out, and things are a little different!…………..
With just a little bit of imagination and a short brainstorming session I was able to come up with three very different shots which all grab the viewers eye and would all stand out from any ‘cup of coffee’ screengrab on Google Images. In each of my images there is movement and something to spark a thought, rather than just being a statement of fact (‘Here is a cup of coffee’). I have also taken a little poetic license and changed the cup to a cafetiere which (to me) always evokes a strong sense smell as well, which is a very powerful tool when advertising a product.
I see! 