Fun With Still Life: What if Quentin Tarantino Reworked an Andy Warhol Classic?

When your love of art and cinema intersect, all kinds of creative possibilities can emerge. Wanting to do some kind of photographic homage to Andy Warhol’s soup cans, I imagined Quentin Tarantino looking at this iconic work of art and thinking, “Maybe that needs a little extra something.”

As practitioners of a visual art form, I think most photographers share an appreciation for a broad range of visual arts. And while the still image has a special place in my heart, I’m also a sucker for the magic of moving pictures, with cinema being one of the great pleasures in my life. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, some of the things that you enjoy in life can come together in your work, like the time I got to be a production photographer, shooting zombies on the set of an independent, period horror movie that was being shot in New England. However, not all of the projects that you get to do as a working photographer are as much fun. Some of them can even be pretty bland and uninspiring, but you do them because they pay the bills.

Whether you’re a working photographer or a hobbyist, though, I think that one of the most essential practices you can follow if you’re serious about your photography is to pursue your own personal projects. Personal projects are extremely important for your growth as a photographer. Apart from being incredibly gratifying, they can be the lifeblood of your inspiration and creativity. I always have at least one personal photography project that I’m actually working on at any given time, along with several potential future projects that range in their state of conception from vague ideas to fully fleshed-out plans with notes and resource materials.

You never know where the inspiration for one of these projects may strike you next. I remember watching a documentary about the way that Andy Warhol’s depictions of everyday items could transform them from something banal into objects of fascination, and a little light went on in my head when I saw his famous piece depicting a set of Campbell’s soup cans. Talking of inspiration, it’s worth noting that Warhol was a commercial illustrator before he achieved his fame as an artist, so in some sense, he was drawing on inspiration from his own commercial career as a driver for his personal artistic work.

When I saw Warhol’s take on the soup cans, I knew I wanted to do something fun with it and use it as a theme for a photographic piece of my own—something perhaps a little gruesome, but hopefully also darkly humorous. I’m somewhat paraphrasing my exact train of thought here, but I remember thinking that Warhol’s soup cans reminded me of the stacked-up cans that you see at those fairground shooting galleries. I also remember thinking that shooting a full can of tomato soup with a gun would probably produce something that resembles the gory scene after a gunfight in a Quentin Tarantino movie—and thus, the idea was born.

I already had all of the photography gear that I needed to shoot this concept. The only thing I really lacked was the actual soup, and after spending half an hour at my local supermarket carefully picking out cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup that weren’t dented or scratched, I was ready to shoot.

The image above was the initial photograph that I selected to serve as the starting point for my final image. I do not claim any kind of expertise or knowledge when it comes to firearms and ballistics, but in my head, I had set up the scene to depict the aftermath of the upper middle can having been shot slightly from the right and then toppling forward to fall on its front. This was going to require adding to this scene some slightly right-to-left fake blood spatter on the background and the adjacent cans, and some fake blood pooling from underneath the can that was shot.

Rather than use flash, I opted to use continuous light from a couple of LumeCube Studio Panel LED lights that I positioned about 45 degrees on either side of the camera - a Leica SL2-S (with ISO set to 400 and a shutter speed of 1/10 sec.) paired with a Leica Vario-Elmarit-SL 24-70mm f/2.8 ASPH. lens (set to a focal length of 37mm and an aperture of f/11). The color temperature of the LumeCube panels can be adjusted over a range of 3,200 to 5,600 K, and I chose the upper limit of this range to get a nice, clean, white light to illuminate the subject.

To create the bullet’s exit hole on the back of the can that had been shot, I used the Layers feature in Adobe Photoshop—first to create a dark patch that would serve as the interior of the hole, and then to duplicate the area of the can’s label that would be punctured by the bullet. In this duplicate layer, I created a star-shaped path with the Pen Tool and erased its interior to allow the dark area underneath to show through. I then used the Pen Tool to select triangular areas around the center of this star-shaped hole, and the Transform Tool’s Warp feature to warp these selections so that they had the appearance of splaying outward from the center of the hole, as if they had been deformed and pushed out by the force of the gunshot.

So far, so good. Now for the fake blood.

In my head, I had originally imagined using the soup from one of the cans to create the fake blood, but Campbell’s tomato soup doesn’t really have the right texture and is actually much closer to orange than it is to the kind of deep red that you need to mimic blood. No worries—time to take a little break and enjoy a nice hot bowl of tomato soup while I think of something else!

In the end, I settled on the classic “Hollywood” solution of using tomato ketchup for the fake blood. These days, the color of the fake blood in movies is largely achieved by using food coloring, but tomato ketchup is sometimes also added to the mix to get the texture right. I planned on deploying my fake blood in the scene in two ways: the first would be the blood pooling underneath the can that had been shot; the second would be some blood spatter from the gunshot on the background behind the cans and on the adjacent cans.

With a little compositing, the tomato ketchup worked fine for the blood pooling under the can, and I figured I could use a syringe to squirt some ketchup onto a white surface as a composite layer for the fake blood spatter on the background. This, however, did not work very well at all, so I ended up using a special effects spatter brush in Photoshop. Since I wanted a fair degree of control over the spatter, I decided to separately apply the spatter on the background and the spatter on the adjacent cans.

To create the spatter on the background, I used the Object Select Tool in Photoshop to select all of the cans and then inverted the selection so that when I applied the spatter brush, it would only paint the spatter on the white surface around the cans—as shown in the animated image above.

Similarly, to paint some collateral spatter on the adjacent cans, I selected each can in turn to apply the spatter so that I could carefully control where it ended up. In keeping with the concept that the gunshot was not exactly centered but came slightly from the right, I applied the fake blood spatter a little more generously to the adjacent cans on the left-hand side.

…and this was the final result (at least for this first pass).

I had a lot of fun with this small personal project, and although I felt that the final image turned out pretty well for a first pass, I can definitely see room for improvement. One of the great aspects of these personal photography projects is that, in addition to juicing your creativity, you can learn so much from doing them. I have also found it very helpful to embrace an attitude that a personal project is never really complete. If you always consider your creative output to be a work in progress, you are never closing the door on making it better or missing out on the opportunity to elevate your own skills and standards in the process.

When we’re working on somebody else's dime, there are usually deadlines to get stuff done, and we rarely have the luxury to sit with a task for as long as it takes us to get it exactly as we would like it. With these personal projects, however, there’s always the option to revisit them and make them better—and implicit in this iterative process of improvement is a sincere and honest critique of your own work that will inevitably make you a better photographer.