Still Life

After experimenting with location (studio and at home) I decided to explore still life and how the viewer perceives things depending on the composition and content. I aimed to change the stereotypical set-up of the old still life images I had been researching and photograph my fruit in a similar style but with an unusual aspect to catch the viewers eye.

I looked at the photographer Joan Kocak and found that her images inspired me the most in this part of my project. Here are a couple of her images;

After looking through Kocak’s work I wanted to experiment with still life and the different things I could alter in the image in post-production to create images with a similar soft and worn tone.

So back to my kitchen I went and set up all my fruit- needless to say my family haven’t had a shortage of fruit salad since I began this project!

I wanted to capture the fruit in its best form. Fresh and ripe as I wanted the viewer to see the fruit as a symbol for prosperity and youth – being in the ‘prime of your life’. Fruit is often referred to in a positive light e.g. ‘eating your five a day’ and ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ – this all promotes fruit as being a good thing to incorporate in your life, something that keeps you healthy and that can help prevent different illnesses due to the vitamins and minerals in the fruit.

Here are some of my edited images from that shoot;

 

Editing the images in Photoshop and Lightroom is something relatively new to me so I used these images to find my way around the software and see what would work best for these types of shots.

These images add the ‘nice’ element to my project – I wanted to depict the fruit how we normally see it, in its mundane and non-exciting form. As a health benefit.

I will the contrast these ‘nice’ images with my next shoots where I plan to mix aspects of surgery and wound sealing with my fruit – I want to capture something that people take a second look at. By mixing surgery (something most people aren’t faced with daily) and fruit (a daily occurrence for most people) I want to create images that leave the viewer feeling uncomfortable – possibly images that most people won’t want to look at.

So that’s enough rambling from me – until next time!

– A.T