Thread #4496665
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Have you ever taken a still life photograph? What did you learn from it?
I am not good at it yet, but it is my favourite genre of photography. I like the idea of trying to execute a concept, telling a story with visual grammar and narrative, but there are many factors that can ruin a still life photograph.
Pic related needed better composition, angling, leading lines, better props, a better background (preferably with a backdrop because the white wall does not add much), and maybe a better table. It was fun nonetheless, and I think I learned something during the shoot because I tried so many arrangements under a time constraint and learned about workflow.
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>>4496665
Yeah. Spending almost a year at this point taking essentially only egg based still lifes has been an excellent way to practice photography on a deeper level than simply camera manipulation. All that stuff is relatively easy. Making an image entirely from scratch is not.
After so long working egg photography I've finally come up with a formal idea for a series of printed still lifes that I think will be amazing. A simple idea conceptually, but one that has really good potential. My series will not really be classical still lifes, but close enough. The bricks one and the reeds one are my first two I've taken for the series.
A fun side effect of working still lifes for hundreds of hours is that it has helped boost confidence, skill, and creativity in other posed or controlled forms of photography like portraiture.
Something that was always a bit difficult for me at first was building height in my more formal still lifes. I think your picture feels a bit unbalanced vertically. The negative space it creates in the image doesn't do anything to enhance. I understand your constraints made this difficult at the time.
A fun way to practice is creating a still life that uses implied triangles between objects to create composition. You can use other shapes, but triangles is a classic. Limiting the number of elements is also a good way to practice.
Here's a phone picture test shot of the third image in my series. This is just to visualize form, see how different backgrounds look, and to play with cropping. I'll spend time over multiple days working on these before I actually take a picture on film. If I'm lucky it will be a one and done.
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i gave it a shot last year. seems like a gnere suited for people who have interesting lives. or at least lives that put them in contact with interesting objects
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Finished my egg and burnt wire shot. It is in fgt.
Here is the next idea I'm working on. Still needs refinement, but I'm liking this idea a lot so far.
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I try to make my gun photos more still life than "center picture of autistic interest" but I'm not sure how well I achieve that.
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Itt