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Colours and shapes
The first month of Kim’s new Be Still course is focused on still life images shot top down. Top-down, looking-down, from-above, flat-lay, they have many names but just one perspective. They may look easy but they are not that easy. Firstly it’s the thing with arranging the right props in the right way with the right background but that’s nothing new in still life imaginary. Secondly, there are a few technical problems. The height from which you can shoot is usually limited, so you need to use such a lens that will include the whole arrangement into your image. The bigger your props the wider angle of the lens needed.…
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My birthday flowers
I have birthday at the beginning of January and I always get some flower(s) from my colleagues when we get back to work after Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Two years ago I used the flower in my 52-week photo project, then last year I used it at the beginning of my still life project. Have you seen (and remembered) those photos? It started to feel like tradition and I didn’t want to make this year any exception. The thing is though that as I get the flower usually on Monday and can’t shoot it until weekend, the shooting is quite a difficult job because the flower gradually fades and…
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Evaluation of my be-still experience
At the end of 2014 I announced my intended participation in Kim Klassen’s year-long course “Be still 52”, a course that was focused on creating still life images. As I told you at that time, after experiencing my 52-week photo project in 2014 I wanted to improve in planning, arranging, working with light, working with the depth of field, working with textures, I wanted to open my imagination more. Have I met those expectations? Have I improved those skills? Here is my evaluation. I haven’t fulfilled all of the assignments that we got in the course but for a change, I don’t feel guilty about it. I started the course…
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Getting messy
In the last assignment that we got in the Be-still-52 course, Kim asked us to get messy… The idea was to use whatever we found appropriate to create a scene that doesn’t look neat but makes an interesting image and take a top-down photo. I had some plants at home that I needed to replant and decided to shoot the replanting which I supposed would be messy enough. Yeah, it was… The first plant is a succulent that was very small when I bought it but it grows really fast. I thought I would separate the offshoots but the root system was not easy to divide so eventually I ended…
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Coffee and change
Take some change, coffee or tea and shoot top-down or any other way that suits you, that was another assignment from the Be-still-52 course I’ve been following this year. I gave it a try and found out that there are so many possibilities how to fulfil this assignment. I agree with Kim who mentioned that it could be quite an interesting series. We still have Czech crowns in the Czech Republic so you can see a few pieces of our Czech change in the images. I have two favourite photos from this shooting, both in two versions. All images have been processed in Lightroom. Photo No. 1 was shot top-down…
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Beauty of the withered
When I was preparing props for my in-crate assignment about which you could read in my previous posts Autumn in the crate and Inspiring hydrangea, I gathered also some withered flowers from my garden and tried to set a few compositions with them. They might have not made it into the group of my favourite shots of that day but they made me think. About fading beauty, about a circle of life, about having (or not) a character. Withered doesn’t have to mean ugly, does it? In the course of this almost year long still-life experimenting, I’ve learnt that some photos carry a plain message but other can wear different coats and arise…
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Inspiring hydrangea
As I promised in the previous “Autumn in the crate” post, I’m going to present a different set of in-crate images today, this time with hydrangea. Even more different than I imagined because when I wanted to create a square-formatted image from my hydrangea-in-crate shots, I found out that all those shots were captured in too tight composition to do that successfully so I tried and set a similar scene for another shooting a week later. Well, as it happens, the newer photos do not look the same… Not only the sky was overcast that day and the light was very different, also perspective changed. But it was an interesting comparison for…
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Autumn in crate
Another assignment from the Be still 52 course was to find a crate or a box and experiment with things put on top of it or inside it, play with the light and shadow, try and turn the crate this way or that way… Kim even started in-crate and on-crate series and I find it to be a great idea. There truly are so many possibilities, in fact quite simple but appealing possibilities, and I find it mind-blowing just to think about them. As you can see in the image above, I started with “in crate” composition and because my shooting was inspired by cleaning that I was doing in…
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Autumnal apple inspiration
Apples belong to every season, perhaps with partial exception of spring, but I have them connected especially with autumn. Many of their varieties turn ripe at this time of year or need to be picked and stored. I’ve learnt quite recently that winter varieties need to be picked in autumn but can’t be eaten until some time of their storage passes, even two or three months, it surprised me. When we moved into our house in the village, there were several apple trees in the garden but all the apples could be eaten at the time of picking and I hadn’t known it could be different until we wanted to…
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How I created my still-life image of a faded rose
There are plenty of photos and images on the Internet and some of their authors generously share the process of creating them, the how-to manual for getting the results they achieved. I love those “recipes” and I’m always eager to have a look behind the scene. It’s enriching in so many ways. The basic processing may be quite similar but when it comes to feelings and reasoning, it becomes personal and inspiring. I’d like to add my contribution to that shared knowledge by showing you the process of creating one of my recent still-life images. The reason why this image came into existence was the fading beauty of that rose.…
