For the found brief I focused on unwanted items, receipts, drinks cans, and plastic bags all with a brown cardboard backdrop. The items all have been discarded and thus unwanted. When photographing these items I took into consideration many different elements such as; light, shape, form, material to name a few. With these considerations on the actual objects, I found that photographing them was quite difficult as they are quite small objects so photographing them I had to get in as close as my lens would allow but this made lighting the objects quite difficult. I normally use a studio lighting set up which is something I invested in off of amazon recently, this is so helpful when shooting in conditions where lighting is scarce or just in studio conditions in general. I added an on-camera flash head to fill in some of the shadows, directing it at the white ceiling to bounce down and make the item better exposed but leaving any shadows to make the image more three dimensional.
This triptych was focused on the unwanted items like I said above, I wanted to capture these items without being too obtrusive of branding but wanted the viewer to still know what the item was like the receipt having the Morrison’s branding on the top, making the receipt more generalised. I liked how I did frame everything to make it fill the frame and not leave too much negative space.
The materials I used played a big part of how I photographed them, the plastic of the bags was shiny so I tried to find an object that would have the same sort of properties as the bag which is why I decided to have to drinks cans which are metal and created a balance between them. I really like how the receipts contrast the other two objects as they are matte and don’t reflect the light rather they absorb the light and make it flatter.
The cans of energy drink I decided to include as they are cylindrical, and reflect light interestingly which I liked. I photographed the cans, decided that I would crush one of them, giving it a different look to make the frame seem more interesting.
Shadows are really important to these images. The way the objects interact with the light makes them cast shadows differently, the way the straight edges create harsh shadows. Giving the image a more industrial feel, whereas the images with rounded or softer edges help create softer shadows that soften the images from the hard industrial feel.
