Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Project 64

After dwelling on this brief for a while I decided to take advantage of a happy co-incidence between my wife baking a birthday cake for her sister and myself working up some Macro imagery of plants from our garden.

This meant that I had my studio set up for close up photography and possession of some interesting objects to photograph.  As a result the "action", I am illustrating is the baking of a cake.  To keep the composition simple I kept the composition simple, sprinkling some flour on a bread board and then arranging a broken egg shell and the parts of a cake mixer:

EOS 5D Mk II, 100mm Macro, f/6.7, 1/125s, ISO 100

Lighting was provided by a pair of 400J mono-blocks in soft boxes.  I aimed one to bounce of a white ceiling providing a soft fill light and the other to the left of the composition as a main light.  The key photographic question then was composition and arrangement.  I have tried to have a strong diagonal together with the softer repetition of the egg shell, the low depth of field combined with extreme close up helping.

The selected photo was one of a sequence I created using a variety of angles and slight variations on the composition.  As I had dusted the board with flour moving the objects around too much created distracting lines in the flour.


Top down simple angle, felt this was too obvious

This was better, but I wanted more emphasis on the shiny metal of the mixer blades


Moving to the other side, this composition lacked any dynamic, but started my thoughts around how the final view would look emphasizing the blades


Dropping down and getting closer the image starts to get more interesting, but the out of focus foreground and poor background made this a reject


Getting in a little closer this was a close candidate, but the eggs are not so obvious and I felt this to be too abstract


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