Kitchen Ghosts

Moscow-based Photographer and Food Stylist Create Delicious Cooking Cinemagraphs

‘Our main theme now is breakfast; it’s the most beautiful meal of the day I think,’ Russian food photographer, Daria Khoroshavina told us. Working together with prop and food stylist Olga Kolesnikova, the pair has created Kitchen ghosts, a series of delectable food and cooking cinemagraphs.

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Their work features delicate moments of the stirring, steaming, chopping and tasting involved in the cooking and eating process.

‘Working with liquids is the most fun, especially sauces and cream, melted ice cream and chocolate. It’s the type of food that moves itself, so it works best,’ Daria said.

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The Plus: How did you and Olga come to work together on Kitchen ghosts?
Daria Khoroshavina:
The first time I saw a cinemagraph, I was so captivated by it that I immediately decided to try something like this. First with portraits and nature, but then I decided to visit Olga for dinner and film her while she prepared food. She’s a photographer herself, and she knows how to style compositions, we became a good team.

TP: What is it like to collaborate with your friend?
DK:
The whole process of shooting food and cookery is quite relaxed, we don’t usually aim for complicated recipes, choosing more simple and appealing things as our mission here is not to teach cooking, but to inspire, make the spectator hungry.

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We asked her more about the work:
TP: How would you describe the style of your food photography?
DK:
Our style is still developing, at first we made step by step recipes only, now we are moving towards making more lifestyle images, each one an original piece of it’s own. I mean, it’s easy to tell a story in a series, but if you can tell it in one image, it’s great, it’s what we try hard to do.

TP: What is the technical process behind creating a cinemagraphs?
DK:
I am not a technical photographer, so I use the simplest tools and try making the best of it. I shoot with a canon 6d on a tripod, edit with After Effects and Photoshop. It’s very easy if you imagine it in layers: take a video, put a photograph on top of it, then make a small hole in the photograph so that you can see the piece of video below.

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