Signs of Life- Final Image & Evalutaion

This is my final image for my Signs of Life assignment. It's my favourite image that I took for this assignment. This image wasn't my intended final image, I had wanted to photograph the veins in leaves under a strong light so that they stood out but I couldn't seem to get that to work for me, so I sat down to sulk when my eyes landed on these wicker reeds up the corner of my living room. I thought that they fit the description of many of the words on our assignment brief, "Dead, Fragile, Delicate, Old, Structure" I used natural light from the windows in my living room and decided that I liked them better when they were silhouetted. I played around with appeture until I settled on F 9.0 at a shutter speed of 1/25. I decided that it gave me the best results. Things that I could have improved on were time management. I left this assignment right up until the last minute which is why I panicked when my initial idea didn't work, I lucked out this time when my random unplanned idea worked but I think I will try to make sure I have time to replan should I need to in the future. I have found some new photographers that I liked, usually I find artist research pointless and tedious but this time I really felt good about the artists I studied and that they linked in with my final image too. I feel that the beads on the reeds tie in with the repetative use of Peas and Pods that Olivia Parker uses and also the dying feel they seem to give off, and I feel that the curing structure of the reeds ties in with Karl Blossfelts images of the plants.
Overall I am really pleased with my final image and would be quite happy to put this image in my portfolio because I am not familiar with still life photography but I found that I quite enjoyed it.

Signs of Life Artist Research- Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt works in black and white and his work usually features plants and living things. His work is primarily still life and his inspiration came from doing a project in Italy when collecting plant samples for drawing classes, he began to document the plants he found being particularly interested in the way the plants grew. His set up seems to be studio more than anything and I like the way he has used a dark background for lighter coloured plants and lighter backgrounds for darker coloured plants. The images I have collected here all feature curly style plants which I feel ties in with my image very well, I like the twisting shapes and curves the plants create. His images are almost abstarct like Olivia Parker's images but different in the way that the whole subject is not photographed and not framed by grid like structures. Blossfeldt used a homemade camera to photograph the his subjects, the camera being able to magnify the object up to thirty times it's natural size which would help him capture all the minute details like tiny hairs on the plants surface. Blossfeldt had a book published in 1928 which made him famous almost overnight and his work is rarely seen now but remains iconic in the history of photography.

Signs of Life Artist Research- Olivia Parker

Olivia Parker works in black and white and her photography is inspired by still life paintings. Her images are usually of plants, insects and fruit amongst other things. Her photographs, whether they are of living things, or things that were once living, suggest an air of death, due to the contrasting and varying tones of her black and white images. She has made black and white as well as colour images in many formats from 4 x 5 to 20 x 24. She also uses a Canon 1D Mark III and 1Ds Mark II. As far as I can tell, she does not digitally manipulate her photographs, prefering to construct her subjects in a studio environment. Her work has been seen in over one hundred exhibitions worldwide and is also featured private and corporate as well as museum collections. I really like Olivia Parker's work because of the high contrast and the desolate atmosphere. You really get a feel of death and decay looking at her images, they are almost abstract in the way that they seem to be out of context but you know what the subjects are because they are things that are familiar to you. The black and white almost gives it an x-rayed feel, or that of a negative, which really helps with the death theme. The use of a studio space and the fact that Parker constructed her compositions herself in the studio also really helps with the fact that her subjects are out of context and out of a setting in which we are used to seeing them.