For this assignment, I chose one of our childrens shape toys, something which exhibited a range of different shapes, colours and textures, designed as it is to excite a childs' imagination and learning.
As a still life, I had a good level of control over the composition, lighting and placement of the camera. I could experiment with the various types of lighting modifiers which I had experimented with elsewhere in the chapter.
My tools were limited to a compact camera on a tripod, together with a pair of table lamps, black and white card and a translucent sheet of thin paper to act as a diffuser.
In this first shot, I wanted to emphasise colour, limiting the composition to include the three primary colours against an unlit background. The yellow ball is the point of focus which emphasises its position as the key element in the image, approximately on the '3rd'.
Lighting was directional, predominantly from the right side of the camera. Considering the reflectivity of the materials, I used a diffuser to soften any highlights which would otherwise have been apparent.
In this second image, I was exploring the effect of different types of lighting, in particular back lighting reflected off the (black) card placed at the back of the composition. The room wasn't entirely in black, so I've recorded some light scatter, avoiding a total sillouette. The key light was on the left side, with a less intense light positioned on the right.
The actual subject is only partly illumated, which has had the effect of diminishing the intensity of the colours, losing most if not all of the texture and giving the image a flat, two dimensional effect.
In this third image, I've tried to emphasise the inherently three dimensional effect of the subject. The key light was placed on the left side, but shadows which otherwise would have formed have been filled with a second light on the right side.
The lighting is predominently from in front of the subject, so the colour of the pieces is well illuminated but not dominant in the image.
This next image, my 'totem pole', has complexity on various levels. Firstly, the composition is assymetric and a little unusual with the emphasis to one side. Perhaps a contrasting element on the right side of the image would have imparted some balance to the composition.
The colours capture the primary and secondary colours. In relative size, they are broadly equal, perhaps with the yellow dominant but with the blue disk the strongest colour.
Lighting is harsh, with no reflectors. One light was used to illuminate the background, making it near completely white. A second light from the right side of the camera boosted the illumination of the back wall, but was primarily used to illuminate the subject whilst generating clear highlights.
So far, the images have not shown any evidence of texture, either because the object was brightly lit with semi-front lighting to obliterate any texture, or in the case of the third image, because the subject is too far away to show the fine detail. Even with a more sophisticated camera, although the detail may be captured, the human eye is not capable of seeing any level of texture.
So the implies that texture involves getting really close to the subject. This is partly correct, but the distance depends on the coarseness of the texture, so for instance the 'texture' of a ploughed field is visible from several feet away, whereas the texture of a piece of glass is only visible under an electron microscope.
In this case, the level of texture required a subject-camera distance of 2-3 inches, the limit that the camera was capable of. The light was more subdued and intended to be running along the surface of the wood so as to emphasise the surface roughness. This was only partly sucessful, mainly because I wasn't able to collimate the light sufficiently to make it truly directional.
Compositionally, the image is clearly very simple. Being a macro shot, it was relatively easy to create something which is a little abstract and virtually unrecognisable from the previous images (of the same subject).
The assignment taught me a good deal about controlling and manipulating light for visual effect, using simple materials which were readily available, to create a range of quite different images of a single object.
This will be a good lesson in how to use light to dramatically change the character and style of a single image, useful when taking photographs which need to fit a particular brief (eg. dramatic images for a front page, or a more subtle image for a quieter application).
