In March 2010, one of the photo clubs I belonged to must have been discussing still-life photography, and how best to do it. "Doing it" involved lighting and background, especially.
I don't recall today whether the pictures in this chapter were taken as part of an actual assignment, but I know I took the subject matter to heart -- and with some levity -- and spent considerable time setting up the dining room table of my home again to serve as a station for various still-life photo concepts that came to mind.
The more I reviewed the pictures from this shoot, the more I think that the Indy Meetup Photo Club asked members to integrate monetary currency into a photo, but I wouldn't swear to it. But when I came across the photos from that session recently while preparing this series, I knew I had never used any of the material from my 2010 shoot in a blog post ... even though it would have been more than a year since the blog had launched. So I thought this series would be an appropriate way to introduce into the blog's official record the crazy concepts I came up with for my still-life experimentation at that time.
I'm sure I borrowed (*wink*) the bottle of Crown Royal to use for the currency centerpiece. As for the empty Bud Light beer can, I must have picked it up in the nearby park (*wink*) on one of my various ventures there. (Actually, as an aside, years before this shoot, one of my children's friends once tried to make me believe that an empty liquor bottle they had in my daughter's room one day was something they had found and picked up in the park -- and NOT discarded.)
But I digress ...
When I tired of the liquor bottle shots, I grabbed a stuffed toy frog (above) that belong to my other daughter and decided to festoon it with the $20 bills, eventually integrating the pennies into the composition (below). I must have been annoyed by the encroaching shadows from all directions on the photo above because the shot below shows shadows appearing only at the bottom of the photo.
The next day, I limited my still-life to just this jar of popcorn salt (above), which I had just purchased at the grocery store. The levity thing must have gone with the wind, because I didn't even try to integrate anything else silly into the photo.
Going back three years from that 2010 shoot, I also tinkered with some other still-life experimentation, again using the dining room table as my "studio." I came up with the image above, an artificial plant that had been given to me as a gift. And in the following month, I played around some more with still life ideas, this time using a "fork in a row" and/or "forks lined up in a row" concepts that eventually included table salt and pepper shakers. The variations I played with are shown below.
As you can probably tell, throughout the shoot, I varied the background type, the subject elements' position and even the lighting and consequential coloring. I'm not sure I came up with anything I was completely satisfied with, although I will say I enjoyed the gleam coming off the forks in images 3, 4, 5 and 6 below. I cannot remember what was responsible for that. Probably flare from a direct hit of the dining room window light on the open, reflective portion of the fork.
As for the gray cardboard backgrounds ... in some cases it appeared that I must have healed a lot of the lines in post-processing at the time. At some point, I gave up the line healing and let the lines stand.
I do know I spent a lot of time, while preparing this chapter, healing tiny spots I was finding on the images. I don't know if those spots materialized on the background boards ... or from the camera sensor. So if you see any spots still on there, I obviously missed them.
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I end this chapter with a final still-life endeavor I had some fun with, mostly because the unusual tomato you see below came from my own backyard garden in summer 2010.
I thought it was a shame to eat the three-section tomato right away, so on Aug. 26 of that year, I quickly put together my makeshift dining room table still-life "studio," this time using a dark blue blanket for background. I believe I used the natural light from the room window for lighting. And other than doing spot healing on white specs of dust that appeared on the blue towel, this is exactly as the tomato appeared.
While putting this chapter together, it occurred to me that I haven't done serious still-life experimenting like this since these shoots almost 15 years ago. That might be because it took a lot of work to set them up on furniture I know I'd need to use again soon for their given purpose, and to adjust and tweak, and/or sometimes reshoot repeatedly in order to get it close to being what I was aiming for.
Maybe you've gone through the same thing ...
Coming tomorrow: Chapter 17, Depew Memorial Fountain, University Park, Indianapolis
Previously in Catching Up ... on pre-blog years:
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