28 Nov 09: A Warhol pastiche

For our first portfolio we are required to produce an image of a commercial product.  One of the most iconic images of a commercial product is Warhol's silkscreen print of Campbell's soup.  During his career Warhol produced a variety of images of Campbell's soup ranging from a single can

to 32 cans (one of each flavour that was made at the time).

I decided to produce a pastiche of Warhol's soup tins by using a can of Campbell's but adding a carton of fresh soup as the up to date equivalent.  When I went shopping it transpired that the original Campbell's soup could no longer be obtained and a little research revealed that  following the 2006 takeover of Campbell's UK by Premier Foods the soup was rebranded as Batchelors (see article in the Daily Mail www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-485107/Iconic-Campbells-Condensed-Soup-disappear-British-shelves.html) and the iconic can of soup is no more.  So I used the Batchelors soup instead.

To make the image I started by photographing both soups in the studio on a product table.  I used a high key background with backlighting to produce a sharp image on a very white background with little shadow.

I then used Photoshop CS4 to stitch the images together. I felt that the result was too crisp so I used the adjustment brush in Lightroom2 to blur the edges of the tin/carton and make the background less pristine and then added a layer in Photoshop to give a slightly aged effect. Here is the final result:

Notes:

Pastiche: musical or other medley made up from various sources; literary or other work imitating style of author, period etc. 
More information about Warhol's images of soup cans can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell's_Soup_Cans

Postscript: Andy later showed me some other techniques in Photoshop for editing the images including how to remove the lens distortion and adding a layer to posterize the image giving it a Pop Art look in a different way to the one I chose.  He just worked on a single can: