Nature Morte

I had been looking at the work of Ori Gersht and his Big Bang video. I found the high pitch noise in the video rather irritating to the point I switched off in my mind as I was watching it until the explosion of the vase woke me up and bought me back to the video I was meant to be watching and then suddenly the glass and flower debris was drifting apart but slowed down so it looked like it was almost floating.

I felt like I need to have a go but make it look a touch more modern. I had fairly bright colours and decided to try and set them on fire instead. We were unable to shoot it in the studio due to fire hazards  so we took an Elinchrom lighting the vase and flowers  from the left as this seems to be a common thing in Nature Morte photographs or paintings. This maybe because we read things from left to right and it would feel unnatural to have the brightest side the bit that you view last.  

Before 

After

The after photograph is defiantly the one I prefer out of the two as it has more depth and asks more questions. It was hard to get the flowers to catch on fire, even though we had dried them out they were still holding moisture so they wouldn't catch alight. We ended up stuffing cotton wool balls in between the stems and flowers. This was also not giving off as much affect as we would have liked so we added match heads and lighter fluied to the mix and it worked a bit better. We waited till it got dark so that we could control the light that was falling onto the vase by the flash. There was also a polly board that was placed to the left as we were outside and car lights kept falling onto the space we were shooting. 

Still Life Video 

This was our attempt at a video it's not the most exiting thing ever but it does show a small amount of damage to the flowers from being set alight  

Documentary Still Life

I thought I will do my documentary project on keys and and would try keeping all the factors the same. 

I needed to use natural lighting so I made a set up in a corridor where there were lots of windows but the light was really defused. I hung the keys of a small hook that was attached to a boom. I did start of with them hanging off a bit of wire but then someone pointed out that it would make more sense if they were on a hook.   

Because the light was changing constantly my background would end up being a different shad on each photograph. I ended up choosing three together with the same lighting where the sun had been behind a cloud for a while so it worked quite well.

In the end I choose the three below to present to the group as these three lots of keys clearly belong to three different types of people they aren't full of key rings but they all have subtle differences. 

Getting ready for the group critique

  

It's always good to see what other people have done on the same brief as you because all the work everyones produced is so different to one another.  

Raphael Dallaporta

Antipersonnel 

Image on the left Raphael Dallaporta - Antipersonnel

Raphael Dallaporta created a still life project on land mines but photographed them in a products style shoot. By the way he photographed the land minds changed the way I saw what I was looking at. This made me begin to see the land minds as perfume bottles and make-up compacts something much different to what it actually is.

But does this make it a product shot? No because it's part of a story and has been purposely photographed with the intent of using harsh studio lights for it to be viewed in a completely different perspective. A product shot is made purely to be sold and shown off in the best possible way.