-
Charm of the faded
Back in March I was capturing books and tulips and I tried several settings. I shared some of the photos in my previous posts Books and tulips and Yellow and blue. There was one more setting though and today I’d like to share some images it brought. The titles of the books below are not important. I chose the books because of their size and the colour of their covers, they looked great together. Some of the tulips I was shooting with were already faded but I decided to use them anyway. Their last moment of glory… I processed both photos in Lightroom and then I sent one of them…
-
Yellow and blue
I love combination of yellow and blue and I used it in another set of photos with books. The first and second photos feature a fantasy novel by Jules Verne “The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz”. It’s an old book and I love all the illustrations it contains. I read it ages ago and when I was flipping its pages on this occasion, it felt tempting to start and read it again. There are only little differences between the two photos but along with the format, I find them interesting. The third photo features another book by Jules Verne “Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen”. I might have never read it…
-
Books and tulips
Book images belong to assignments of the second month of Kim’s Be Still course and one would say that they are easy to be created. Not everything is as easy as it looks though and I can tell you that I had a hard time with them. For this first series I used tulips that I bought last weekend. I hesitated in the shop whether to buy a bouquet in one colour or this mixture but when I made the decision and brought the tulips home, I was really pleased about how wonderful the mixture looked. As you might have guessed, the book in the top-down photo above focuses on…
-
Magic of coincidence
Take a tray. Put a colander inside the tray. Put a watering can inside the colander. Shoot. I know, it sounds like utter nonsense. I’d definitely shake my head in disbelief at such an idea. But coincidentally, the other day I bought those three things for my still life photography and when I wanted to take them and place them somewhere (no idea where at that moment), I put them together in the above mentioned way and went looking for some available space. When I got back and saw them sitting on the table, it struck me how interesting they looked together. That made me go and grab my camera…
-
Beauty of the simple
Last time I promised to show you another try of mine at a top-down-taken photo, something a bit different than the elaborate and colourful composition you could see in the previous post, and here it is: It’s a very simple composition and I expect that (some of) you might find it (a bit) boring. Yet look at the pattern on the towel, the shapes and lines created by the colander, the subdued colours… all the parts contribute to the whole which I find delicate and beautiful. When I posted a square version of the arrangement on Instagram, I wrote to it that “beauty of the simple makes you see a…
-
Some things are simply meant to be
The other day my husband and I were shopping in a Tesco hypermarket in Pilsen. Inside the building, there were presented several large boards promoting books to be published, each side of the boards was devoted to a single book. There was always a paragraph or two presenting the book and its author but what especially attracted my attention were images of the book’s covers along with their drafts and other versions, it’s something one rarely has the opportunity to see. Who could resist having a look behind the scene? Several of the promoted books were written by Franz Kafka, a writer coming from a Jewish family who was writing…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
