There’s some food photography I want to do, but I’ve decided I should practise my setup before I undertake anything complicated. So, on an overcast day when the light was soft, I put a table by a window and spread some jelly beans across a sheet of foam-board. I stood two more sheets of foam-board on end to act as reflectors to soften the shadows. Then I went to work with my 100mm f2.8L macro lens.
Satisfied with the way my jelly beans were looking, I took things to the next level. I’d picked up a few plastic soldiers when I was at Sugar Mountain. Why, you may ask, does a candy store sell plastic soldiers? Good question. Maybe to indoctrinate children. Kind of fucked up if you ask me.
Happy with my machine gunner doing point in a jelly bean wasteland, I added rice to the mix. You can move rice around to give it shape, geologically speaking. Along with the rice, I added a few more military personnel since my green soldier was all alone and getting anxious. One of the jelly beans could be a mine. Step on a red one and it might blow off the poor guy’s leg.
Things were looking austere, so I added a dark background to give things a sense of foreboding. Because I’m using a fairly tight DOF, the background is blurred, so you can’t see that I’m using a painting – a drizzle experiment in acrylic – by Ethan Hanzel. A couple years ago, he posted a photo of it on his Facebook page and asked for bids; we won the auction, which means we’re the proud owners of a Hanzel original.
It’s a jungle out there, and a couple wild gummy worms took out the orange infantry guy. The other military types look on, helpless. With all the gummy worms lurking under the rice, it looks like jelly bean mines are the least of their worries. BTW – does anybody know what kind of a gun the green guy is carrying? It looks like it could do some serious damage, but still no match for a hungry gummy worm.
For the final shot, I added a glass insulator from a high-voltage transmission line. It’s the blurred thing behind the green soldier. I swapped out the red/orange gummy worm for a green/yellow worm; it was harder to see the downed soldier in the previous image. I gave the red/orange worm to the blue soldier. I also gave the image some “atmosphere” by shooting jets of steam into the scene from a little steam cleaner we use for our floors. I had thought I’d be able to recover all the rice and cook it for dinner. Unfortunately, the steam melted the jelly beans and their colour bled into the rice and made it sticky. I like sticky rice, but not when it’s dyed red and green.
The whole set up, including foam boards, foodstuffs and plastic soldiers, cost me about $25. In my view, that’s all any military budget deserves.