Personal Background
Sam Kaplan is 27 and was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Almost immediately after he graduated from Wesleyan University, he moved to New York. While in college, he majored in Studio Arts, with a focus on photography, but says most of what he learned was from assisting other photographers and shooting photographs himself. When he was settling into New York, he “wasn’t even aware that you could be a commercial photographer.” Some of his clients include: New York Times, Fortune, Men's Health, and Budweiser.
Style
His photography style is hard to describe, yet very distinct and unique. Most of the photos he takes are either still lifes or objects, they almost all feature a bright colored background and an object (or multiple) that are roughly the same color or complete opposites. He has also done more creative and immersive types of photography like stop motion. His photos are all very crisp and professional looking. Alot of his pictures are also focused on fancy food/drink, but he has done lots of work for candy companies and other related companies.
Philosophy
The New York photographer likes to describe his philosophy with one word: simplify. He believes that photographs should all feature simpler elements blended and combined to form a more complex and sophisticated photo. His original photography started because he was bored and found it fun to do in his free time. It wasn't until he moved to New York that he realized that he could turn it from a fun hobby into a legitimate career. He has said that one of the most important things to remember when shooting commercial photos is to only shoot what you really think looks good, not what you think the client will like.
Influences
Since I stumbled upon him while doing one of the first journals for this class, he has inspired me to take away a lot of unnecessary procedures and to shoot what I really want to shoot as opposed to what I think you’ll like. I found him while doing journal #1, the “photos you find online that you like or that you wish you could take”. I have spent lots of time scrolling through the hundreds of visually pleasing photos on his website (https://www.samkaplan.com/). Overall, my photos have become well composed and much more simple. Simplicity is almost always a good thing.
Sources
Compare and Contrast
Sam's photos feature a much larger amount of objects (peanuts and pretzels). The reason mine did not contain nearly the same amount as his is because I ran out of peanuts (got distracted while setting up the photo and ate some of them). His photos also look cleaner, and the lighting is different. You can tell that he had a professional lighting and editing team because of how the food just looks absolutely perfect. You can also tell the difference between the DSLR he used vs the IPhone 6s I used to take the pictures, his just look crisper and it almost seems like the DSLR is able to focus on more things at once than my IPhone.
Personal Reflection
I'm gonna be completely honest, I choose Sam because he has a lot of food photography and I didn't realize how difficult it would be to recreate the photos he takes."Its just food, how hard can it be?". That's a direct quote from me before I started this project. I quickly realized while taking the pictures that they were gonna look a bit different from the ones he took due to my short supply of the foods needed. Sam was paid to take the photos as advertisements for the companies, so his budget for the photo shoots was much more than my humble $0 budget. It actually took me a lot of tries to get all the peanuts in focus at the same time while keeping the shadow of my phone out of it. The pretzels were the same way. This has taught me that I cant really control how my food looks, each one is a bit different because I wasn't able to cherry-pick the best looking ones from the packaging line like the companies that provided the food for Sam. After scrolling through his entire portfolio twice, I couldn't find an easier picture than the one I had initially chosen (the glass jars one) which is why I didn't recreate it. This class was fun, and although i didnt always show it, it was pretty fun and enjoyable throughout.