Photography project: Still Life

Apologies for not posting for a while, university has been very busy with a photography deadline yesterday taking up a lot of my time. 

The last project I have recently completed was all about still life. You are able to see my research here: http://mph94.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/london-tripphotography-research.html

In terms of the photo-shoots, they were mostly mixed. On the first one, I dedicated the time to photographing the shrine for my grandma/granddad. Below are the variations I tried out. 

Annoyingly, none of the shots grabbed my attention so I decided to return to this shrine in the next photo-shoot, along with taking time to photograph the other shrine dedicated to my uncle Roy. It was a tight schedule but I managed to try out different variations (seen below).  

I was a lot happier with the grandma/granddad shrine as I was pleased with the variation and the lighting was great. At least one of the pictures would be edited. 

With Roy's shrine, I attempted to use the projector on a few occasion's, but unfortunately I could not get the items lit right and have the projected screen on show at the same time. I did manage to think of a way to get the shot I wanted though...

Moving on, I chose my best pictures and edited them. You can see them below (apologies about the first image orientation, it was the only option for printing). 

I was most satisfied with the second set of photos and decided to select the top image for the final print as I preferred having the items closer.

Below are the best edits from my uncle Roy's shrine.

I was happy to discard the pictures on the left as I felt the layout on the bottom row was missing that extra LP cover. However, I managed to achieve what I wanted to do on the bottom right picture by placing one of the projected images onto the original picture via Photoshop. I was very pleased with the final outcome and used that for my final print.

This is one of my final prints. I chose to complete a shrine for my grandparents as they traveled around Europe on a Triumph motorbike in the 1950s shortly after they were married. It has been fascinating to learn about the history of people I have a lot of respect for with their great memories.

This is the other final print. My uncle was a professional musician during the 70s/80s and was in bands like 'White and Torch' and 'King of Fools'. It has been a great opportunity to play some of his old songs and to hear stories of people he met in the music business (and still in contact with). 

Overall, I have found the still life project the most difficult and I would like to experiment further with the lighting. However, I was very pleased with the final results despite this and I would not avoid doing still life again in the future. 

With this photography project done, I can now focus on getting up-to-date with my graphics work. There are some exciting ideas in the pipeline and am very excited turning them into reality!

Mike