This project was a lot of fun for me.  I wanted something that no one else had done, but not something that would be “hard”.  Lemonade was something that came to mind right away.  I sketched up my idea and eagerly awaited getting started.  My first goal had been to collect all the needed equipment, and as I walked to the studio I had reserved, the moveable wall that contains a window jumped out at me.  I asked if anyone else was using it and quickly moved it into my studio and my ideas started changing just a bit to include this window. 

The window, to me, helped to speak of late summer afternoons on the porch.  We put a light behind the window to simulate the sun, and as I worked on this image it looked more like the light coming from inside the house onto the porch table and lemonade outside.  I was pretty excited!  With help from classmate assistants we quickly arranged my props with my lemonade in a tall jar.  I wanted to wait to cut the lemons I had placed on the cutting board, as well as waiting to pour lemonade into the glass until the lighting was all set up.

Positioning the bottle of lemonade on the table with a highlight hitting it to go along the length of the bottle was actually the hardest art of this project, but it was a required element for the assignment.  With my instructor's help we moved a flat diffuser panel into place to help bounce the light and soften it as required.  This diffuser panel had to be placed literally up next to the camera lens, across the table as close to my bottle of lemonade and the glass accompanying it so that it wasn’t in the frame, and still allow the window to be placed in the back of my photo. 

I really wanted the bottle of lemonade to be the focus, but felt that it needed some props.  Lemons, a bowl, a knife, a glass, all added to my arrangement without taking away from the bottle.  It’s not unusual to have a slice of lemon on the rim of a glass of lemonade, so I added that to my glass and to the carafe of lemonade.  Simple, and understated, that still allowed the bottle of lemonade to speak for itself.

As I took pictures we noticed dark areas in the background that we hadn’t intentionally set up, but when looking at them on my laptop they really worked great!  It gave some great dimension and depth to my image that drew the eye around the entire frame.  Some of the lemons had a great highlight on them, as well as the bottle of lemonade that contained the translucent highlight along the length of it.  These highlights all added “life” to my image.  While lighting the bottle was my biggest challenge, I wouldn’t say it was particularly “hard” for me to accomplish.  I think I was also pretty successful in getting some true tonality throughout my entire image.

I am pretty happy with the final image for this project.  I know that there is always room for improvement, but for my first attempt, I was pretty happy with the results.  I can’t wait to learn more in the coming months and come back to this image to see what I am will still be able to improve upon.  I had a few things that I think really helped me in completing this assignment.  I had great team members to assist me and their input was very helpful.  I also think it was a tremendous help for me to have sketched my idea out so that I could use that as a reference for a starting point.  Keeping my mind open to changes and others' input was also incredibly helpful.  Having learned some very basic studio lighting was helpful, but I know that I still have so much to learn on this.  My final image was pretty much what I had sketched out, with the addition of the window and some other minor additions or changes.

Digital Composite

During my first quarter of photography classes we learned how to do digital composites.  This quarter we are also doing them in our photographic design class.  I’m getting more comfortable with doing these.  While I don’t intend on doing a lot of digital composites they can be fun, and I can see how I would utilize this skill for doing the digital scrapbooking that I would like to do.

For this class we were instructed to choose one from four different artists and their movements to emulate for this project.  Our group chose Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, a film noir style painting created in 1942.  To accomplish this project we needed to photograph each person in our group of five separately, shoot a background, and other supporting objects/subjects, to composite into our final pieces.  Each person had to create their own individual composite plus we had to create one group composite. 

 After researching film noir we decided that our characters needed a story that would all tie together in the final composite.  This storyline was essentially that some characters were married and that they were all cheating on one another, and in the end one of the characters would have died, but no one would be able to tell “who done it” because every one of us could have been guilty.

In my group individual composite (below) three of our characters walked up on two of the others who were married, but the two of them had been cheating on two of the other characters that had just walked up.

 

In our final group composite, one of our characters ends up dead.  Two of the women look smug, the other woman is sad because he died, and the last man is nonchalant.  Can you depict which of the characters has killed the man?