I decided to take a leaf from Mary Jo Hoffman’s book by taking all of my photos from a top down view using a tripod and natural lighting.
I went out to my local park to gather together any interesting leaves, flowers, stones and other natural objects that caught my eye. I felt an interesting way to present these objects would be in the form of a mandala which is often used in religion to refer to the universe, all of which these objects dead, alive, new or old are a part of giving a nice meaning behind my photographs.
For my set up I used a planter in my back garden as I loved the look of the soil and tiny patches of greenery surrounding my objects.
For my first image I went for a fairly subdued colour palette consisting of mostly brown tones and dead leaves to represent the end of these object’s life cycle.
In my second image I decided to introduce a little bit of colour in the form of some green leaves to give the impression of new life and it’s beginnings.
I added some flora to this next arrangement to add more colour and definition to the image. Sadly with the time of year I found my search for flowers much harder especially as I was only uses resources I had found on the ground rather than taking living flowers that were still growing.
It was a fairly difficult process getting my images even as the tripod I had booked out didn’t have the feature I required for a perfect top down view and therefore I ended up creating my images by using it handheld which almost gave movement to the objects with their slightly off centred arrangement. If I were to do this again I would experiment with studio lighting and tripod in a similar set up to that of Mary Jo Hoffman for a much more accurate and consistent triptych.
In my final triptych I added some more saturation to the image and some colour burn for a much bolder effect and placed in on a wood effect background to really accentuate the natural theme to my photography. I felt adding a slight drop shadow helped make the images stand out from the background so it didn’t take away from the pictures. Overall I was fairly pleased with the other all look and felt changing the saturation really brought the 3 images together.
Leave a comment