REFLECTION

I love working with light, so this was a welcome assignment. I did have to reshoot several of the items, mainly because I needed to zoom and focus on specific portions of the objects better. Sometimes, I was just unhappy with the overall look of the photographs. I also originally photographed a strawberry balancing on a ceramic spoon but it was knocked over and damaged what little white paper I did have.

The most challenging thing about this assignment was finding a place to set everything up. I don’t own a table or even chairs, and have very little room for movement in my living space. I had to keep everything set up until the following day because I was unable to continue shooting while I looked for interesting things to photograph. Since all my furniture is white, my smaller objects tend not to be white and I struggle to find lighter objects, but landed on mainly reflective light colored objects for the high key photos. In all cases, I was unable to force the aperture on my camera to be any wider. The light painting was fun; I have never done anything like it before.

My favorite photograph is the backlit photo simply because of the result. There was hardly any other light in the space and the black glitter skull (which I borrowed from my punk rock salon owner and friend) on black background created a haunting, magical appearance. Selecting a photo for “Texture is emphasized” was challenging only because so many of the photographs included objects where texture was pivotal. But although the light is coming from above, I liked the way it made one of my many world collectibles look like a museum piece.

One regret is that because I had to go back reshoot, some of my objects were placed in different spots, making some of the photos inconsistent. For example, I was very bothered by the scale differences between the coffee cups. I almost considered going back to reshoot all of them, but the amount of time I spent on the project rendered this unrealistic and the goal was to learn about light. But if this were to go beyond this, I would need to consider reshooting these for consistency.