With many of us currently at home or in lockdown, opportunities for photoshoots are mostly confined to where we live!

Don’t worry – even if you don’t have a home studio, there is still a huge range of subjects you can shoot at home which will be relevant for the publishing industry.

In this series of posts we’ll be sharing our tips for shooting at home. We’ll also suggest popular concepts and themes for book publishing which can be shot in different rooms and spaces wherever you live!

Food

Photographing food with book cover design in mind can be a rewarding subject to tackle while working at home.

In fiction cover design, fruits and vegetables are the most popular food elements. They can suggest many different concepts and emotions. Fruit peel is also used frequently by designers, as a way to suggest things being revealed, exposed or unravelled.

Cakes, pastries and sweets also make many appearances in book cover designs, often making use of vibrant colours to help a cover stand out.

Food that has been spilled or dropped can create a humorous mood, but can also suggest something wrong or unsettling. We often see melted ice creams being used for these effects as well.

Finally – if you can bear it! – decaying or rotten food, fruit and vegetables can create powerful and unsettling imagery for book covers. 

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We hope this gives you some starting points for home photoshoots – over the rest of this series we’ll suggest some themes and book cover concepts that can be shot in each room of the house!