Get Creative at Home
The Christmas and New Year celebrations are over and there
are no more parties left to photograph, so where do you point
the camera now?
It's too cold, wet and miserable outside so let's stay indoors
and see what we can find. You never know, that competition
winning shot might just be lurking on a shelf somewhere, just
waiting for a little bit of creative thought!
Your own house is definately proof of the old saying about
familiarity breeds contempt, but open your eyes and amaze yourself!
One of my favourite little photographic playthings is slicing
up fruit and vegetables and trying to make pleasing shots.
We've all seen those amazing photographs in recipe books where
a carefully arranged salad can be made to look mouth watering.
All you need to begin with is a little space in the kitchen,
a sharp knife and maybe a tomato or an apple.
You will need to get creative with the lighting to duplicate
those recipe book shots, but we'll look at that in the next
article.
For now, try slicing an apple say, through the centre and
photograph the patterns around the seeds.
Try slicing a couple of tomatoes, one vertically from the
stalk down, the other horozontally, and compare the different
seed patterns.
How about an orange or grapefruit? Again, cutting in different
directions gives different results. Try quatering it and rearranging
the bits.
If you are methodical how you go about this and make notes
as you go, you will learn lots about how things like depth
of field can be manipulated by altering aperture settings.
If you have a macro facility, use it and use a desk lamp to
light the subject. You will soon learn how moving the light
around can make surprising differences to the results.
The shots in this article are not going to win any prizes,
but all I did was grab some space on the kitchen table and
start messing around. Within 30 minutes I had over 40 shots
comparing different aperture settings, focussing on different
areas and comparisons of auto and manual focusing.
All of this was done with no fancy accessories and nothing
but ambient light aided by the built in flash. In other words,
plenty of experience of handling the camera with no outside
interference or pressures. Just what you need.
Look out for the next article
in which I'll talk about lighting for this kind of work.
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