Feeling a bit overwhelmed today so I forced myself to take a time out and do something fun to get my creative juices flowing again.
I decided to reproduce an exercise I did in photo school: photograph an ordinary object in a unordinary way. You walk into a room and pick up the first two ordinary objects you see. I picked up a fork and a container of Kosher Salt.
Both objects are rather ho-hum to look at. The fork has very straight lines but when turned sideways curves appear. Why not shoot a hard light from the side and see if I can get an interesting shadow? This will also keep the majority of the fork in shadow so you won’t see the dings and scratches it’s accumulated over the years.
I set up a piece of poor man’s dry-erase board and placed a bare bulb light camera right fitted with a snoot. I intentionally shot at a very shallow depth of field (F2 on a 135mm lens) so as to lead the viewer’s eye up into the picture.
I think it came out fairly successfully. You have multiple patterns of shapes and lines and curves. A nice triangle created between the light and shadow leading the viewer’s eye around the picture.
Now the salt.
I originally was going to attempt to photograph the salt falling and then dragging the shutter to create white lines of motion. Unfortunately, focusing proved more difficult to master than I anticipated. But I liked how the salt appeared where it fell, so i turned the light on it and shot the pile at a low angle. Shooting at another shallow depth (f2.8 on a 135mm) created a line of in focus crystals and allowed the others to blur out into bokeh oblivion. The whole image has a strata of horizontal lines and circles giving a vertical composition a layered appearance.
Well, if anything I have a couple of pics to hang in the kitchen. Yay! Another item on my to-do list checked off!
1 comment