“Of all the reasons people are motivated to travel, food is one of the greatest,” says Conde Nast Traveller – India Edition in their March issue dedicated to food. Conde Nast Traveller – India Edition is just one of Conde Nast India Group’s publications and the editor of Traveller, familiar with Jignesh Jhaveri’s food photography, reached out to him to do some coverage for the issue. With lots of creative license, Jignesh put together not only some beautiful raw food photos, but some pretty sweet time lapse videos as well.
After a meeting with the editorial and art team, Jignesh got a strong sense of the concept and was able to help flesh it out. He suggested elements such as showing chocolate as sculpture, incorporating a coffee syphon, and shooting salt as landscape, which the creatives happily got behind. Jignesh says that the article itself was a source of pride for him, as it’s all about the very high quality food that can be found in India.
We also decided not to use any packaging in the images—to showcase the food for what it was. I had quite a few images in my portfolio that demonstrated that the food elements would look good without packaging.
For the shoot, Jignesh and the team first started with the editor’s wish list of foods to showcase, making minor tweaks to it and then sketching out the shots. Jignesh says it’s always fun for him when he can participate in the planning and visual design as well as shooting the images.
The biggest challenge of the project actually came up when it was time to bring in the product for the shoot. With the foods coming from all different parts of India, and with unseasonable flooding blocking travel in the southern regions of the country, some of their foods barely made it. In the end, the photo shoot went off without a hitch, with Jignesh even creating some bonus material that wound up being great for the magazine.
The videos are basically time lapses shot during the main shoot – honestly for fun, while we were waiting for the coffee to brew and the blooming tea to bloom – but ended up being edited together as teasers prior to the magazine release.
Check out the videos below!
Blooming Tea:
Coffee Syphon:
Be sure to check out more work from Jignesh at foodphotography.in!