sjl photography: May 2020

Irving Penn - Still Life Photographer May 2020

https://irvingpenn.org/still-life

https://archive.artic.edu/irvingpennarchives/still-lifes/

https://www.vogue.com/article/irving-penn-food-photography-vogue-archive

”Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.” – Irving Penn

The worst thing you can do as a photographer is to bore your viewer. You want to create images that excite, interest, and stimulate your viewer.

Object Photography - Forced Perspective May 2020

Forced Perspective

We all know that the lens in the camera can take out depth and distance. It can make this appear closer together. Forced Perspective is a name for the technique where things that are closer or farther away are photographed to appear smaller or larger than they actually are.

Have a play, you will need to do some experiments. You may need to play with the aperture on your camera with a higher fstop (f11, f18 f21) to stop the camera lens pushing the object in the foreground out of focus. Changing the fstop or aperture will mean changing the ISO or shutter speed to balance the light level. Luckily its bright outside so you can this easily without ending up with blurry or dark shots

Kerry who did this one, uses photo-manipulation and layering and explains how she does that on a blog, but you could easily do this shot with an SLR and a long depth of field / high fstop. Careful because the girl up the ladder is actually tipping tea on the floor which is a/ waste of tea and b/messy

Object Photography May 2020

"What They Didnt Teach You In Photoschool" by Demetrius Fordham is an interesting book about good oractice, rather than studio techniques for aspiring professional photographers.

Fordham breaks photography specialisms down into

Fashion

Portrait

Product

Outdoor / Landscape

Event

and Photojournalism

Product Photography covers everything from food and drink, to still life photography of accessories and clothing items. Work typically coming from cataogues, magazines, agencies and fashion brands

Burning House

If your house was burning what would you take with you? Its a conflict between whats practica, valuble and sentimental. What would you take that reflects your interests, background and priorites. Think of it as a question condensed into one question.

This is what the Burning House Website / Blog says. We would say condensed into one photograph.It is an interesting idea for an object or product photograph. You could do a series, maybe your priorities and what is important changes day to day or week to week.

As an idea it has been superseded by Instagram, it is a very Instagram idea and since the growth of Instagram over the last decade BH site has gone a bit quiet with only a handful of posts in the last five years, suggesting it isnt being updated anymore or people are not sending in posts. We did actually have a Sixth Form student who successfully made a submission

Depth of Field

Use Depth of Field to push the background and figures in a portrait to make objects in the foreground the focus of the photograph

This is a technique I have used a lot to focus on other peoples phone photos. Here are photos taken at an event in Luton

The phones and the cameras rather date these Photos ( they were taken during the UK Olympics in 2012)

Here is a link to this blog about using spectacles and glasses as obects to look through

https://sjl-photography.blogspot.com/2015/02/a2-art-and-photography-edexcel-2015.html

Article within this blog on Depth Of Field

https://sjl-photography.blogspot.com/2017/09/you-can-use-aperture-of-camera-to.html

Marshall Gray - Seven 7 Deadly Sins Still Life

Marshall Gray is a professional photographer and his website is an excellent starting point if you want to look at quirky or exciting compositions and examples of thinking outside the box.

website

As well as a website he also has a blog where he plays with ideas. Here are some examples of his themed Still Life photography

Seven Deadly Sins