Tag Archives: focus

Still Life triptych

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final found objects piece

This is my final piece for my still life brief. Our brief specified to go to a certain location and take photos of found objects around the area, however I first experimented with taking photos of mouldy/half eaten food in my flat. I started with the apple and think this looked really effective. I decided I wanted to do a mouldy food series as I thought these would look good as a triptych. I originally thought of using mouldy bread with the apple but the bread didn’t mould very quickly and when it did the photographs weren’t as effective as my banana and grapes images. I also thought of using an apple, cactus and something else that was organic and had a green colour scheme to it. But I couldn’t find anything that would be suitable and be a good match with the apple and cactus so didn’t use the cactus image in the end.

For my final 3 images I allowed the half eaten fruits to mould for a few days as I thought this would give a much more interesting effect to the image and the object than if they were ripe fruits. They now have creases, different colours, lines and details that they didn’t before. I took lot’s of images of each of them and then used lightroom to edit and choose the best images. Although I tried to use the best settings on the camera I still did some editing so enhance the colours, textures. Although the raw images were slightly noisy I thought this could enhance the details and make the objects look more gritty. I also used lightroom to make the objects slightly glow. As the grapes were dark purple they didn’t show up very well on the black background like the apple and banana did. So I made the centre of the image glow slightly so that the edges were still a dark black but the grapes could be seen better. I did this slightly on the other 2 images too so they were consistant.

I chose to arrange the images in this order as the lines in the apple curve inwards, the grapes point towards the centre and the apple curves inwards. This means they all point towards the middle, making it a comfortable triptych to view and the lines are easy to follow. I think this was important to my images as the actual subject of them (mouldy food) isn’t very comfortable or enjoyable to look at, so by making the photographs enjoyable, its balanced out.

Cactus photographs

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Initially with the apple photos I didn’t experiment much with the camera, just with the composition and the lighting. For this project I’ve been using a Samsung NX3000 digital camera with a 16-50mm zoom lense. Although this isn’t the camera ideal for photographing my found objects I think the pictures came out a good quality. I experimented with the white balance, lighting (using my desk lamp), aperture and shutter speed.

Shutter speed: When i changed this the camera wasn’t steady enough to take the photo and it usually came out blurred, so i left it on the cameras automatic settings. As the object was still, the shutter speed wasn’t an important element to change.

cactus fail 3

White balance: I tried using a white piece of paper in front of the camera to adjust this but my camera didn’t respond well to this as the lense is slightly broken. To experiment properly with this I would have to use one of the DSLR cameras. Although the white balance was off int his photo, I quite like how it came out anyway as it has kind of transformed into something else, its not obviously a cactus anymore.

cactus fail 1

Lighting: I used a desk lamp to light my object, which I had placed in front of a plain black paper background. I wanted to use black paper as I think this can really focus the viewers attention on the image. I could have used white as well but I felt this would look too much like a stock image and this wasn’t what I wanted to achieve. The desk lamp was successful to light the object and i moved it around to try and eliminate shadows and create a dark background.

cactus fail 4

Aperture: I experimented slightly with this as I wasn’t totally confident with what I was looking for. I just tried different settings and saw which produced the best images. I enjoyed changing the focus between the front pins on the cactus and the back ones and think this is a good way to change the image.

cactus fail 2