Assignment 2: STILL LIFE WITH NATURAL LIGHT SERIES
Ideation
For project the requirements are that it is a still life with natural lighting from a window and that the subject had to be food.
Food is a very broad topic. It essentially is anything that we eat so which is anything containing carbohydrates, lipids, protein, and or water. Let’s face it that would be almost anything and I needed to narrow down my focus. So I started thinking about what part of food do I want to explore. I ended up coming to the conclusion that I wanted to explore raw ingredients and spices.
I started off with salt, pepper and rice and played with the idea of it falling out of the containers. It was fun but I wanted to get more photos I was really just experimenting. The next day I tried eggs and I ended up being really fascinated with all the different ways I could try and display them. We had both white and brown eggs so I explored that, as well as creaked eggs.
Preparation: Setup
For my set up I used one large sheet of black card stock, a tripod, and a sheer sheet. I also had a white and black Bristol board on standby to play with absorbing and bouncing light. I didn’t end up using my make shift bounce.
I went with a back backdrop because I wanted it to absorb some of the shadows. Long shadows were not what I wanted to do with this shoot. Black also created a good contrast with the white subjects I was planning on using. I wanted my photo to have a studio feel to them.
After taking a few pictures I discovered the direct lighting was a bit too harsh. I wanted to diffuse the light a little to make the lighting a little more even in the photo. After searching the closet I finally found a sheer white sheet that would still let a lot of light through. I worked very well.
Production: taking photos
I was set up and shooting over two days. On day one I shot my photos primarily vertically. On this day I used pepper, salt, and rice as my primary subjects. It was pretty sunny out. On the second day, I shot my photos all horizontally and it was more overcast out. For both days I shot with my camera in full manual mode. I kept my ISO fixed and manipulated my aperture and shutter speed to get my shots.
Here a honourable mentions
My selected 4 images for this series
Post Production Editing and Export
I started by putting all of my photos for this project into a collection. This separates my project from the rest of my catalogue while still being a part of my catalogue. After that was done I started narrowing down my photos to the ones that I wanted to include in my series. I did this in two stages, the first flagging, and the second with stars.
Once I finished my selection I made virtual copies and started some basic editing in Lightroom.
Once I had finished editing my in Lightroom, I brought the photos into photoshop. While shooting some of the egg whites had gotten on the backdrop. The egg whites on the backdrop were visible in the photos and created distracting elements in the composition. This was easily taken out using the clone stamp tool.
Presentation
Reflection
For this project, I wanted to look into photographing raw food. I find when I think of food I often think of the finished product I am about to eat, but many times that is not how the food started out. We often combine different ingredients and or cook them. This got me fascinated. Starting off bro ad I was photographing a few different things such as salt pepper, and rice, then I thought why not eggs? This is when it really got eggciting for me. There were just so many ways I could change up displaying the same subject. Looking back it kind of cracks me up. I feel that playing with displaying the eggs really got me to think of how the light was hitting them. I found this especially true for the creaked egg shell.
Side notes. Clouds moving can be frustrating when working with natural light. And thank you for putting up with my egg puns.