Cherry Still Life

Overview

Two cherries, one seamless background, and an entire afternoon. This series began as a lighting exercise and became a meditation on appetite — how little a photograph needs to make a viewer hungry. The work now anchors my commercial food portfolio and has appeared in two café menus.

Gloss was the enemy and the prize. Cherry skins reflect everything, so the studio had to disappear: black flags everywhere except a single soft window of light, placed to draw one clean highlight down each fruit without blowing out the reds into orange.

Approach

Still life is food styling plus product lighting. I art-direct the set — sourcing, ripeness, stems, surfaces — then light like a jeweller, because produce deserves the same precision as diamonds. Every frame in this series was composed in camera, with only dust and stray fibres cleaned afterwards.