Apples with the Fujifilm X Pro 1

Here are two images lit with a Bowens strobe and soft box and the X Pro 1.  The first shot with the 60mm lens and the second is shot with the 35mm lens.

I was trying for dark, moody and slightly out of focus.

I've done a lot of shooting at f11 and really wanted to play with shallow depth of field.

Who spilt the cherries laughs last....

I wanted to find a way to make the cherries look interesting.  I didn't want to do a straight beauty shot, but something a little different.

I thought I could create psychological and visual tension by spilling them.  Then I realized a little water might add a kind of neo-Baroque drama and mystery.  Although the top frame appears almost black and white, it is made in colour.

Roses....8

I was on my walk yesterday and noticed the "yard sales" were happening everywhere.  Yard sales are where people put out the stuff they can no longer store or stand and others who have a gap in their materialism buy it for next to nothing and get it home to discover.....

Well in my case, I was looking for a companion lamp to our existing table lamp.  Bingo.
And I also noticed this little rock crystal vase, ((middle of frame), that I thought might look good holding a rose. So there I was walking down the street with a table lamp in one hand and a little glass vase in the other.

Fifty roses.....2

This is the second rose still life.  Some might think it looks frightfully like the first.

Well it does and it doesn't.  The challenge with series is to push them along; to see how many variations on a theme work.  Painters often paint variations on a theme and over the years, they are seen to stand on their own as distinct ideas.  So time will tell.

The idea in Roses 1 was the memento mori, mostly:  Living and dead roses, the straight razor, my old friend death in the form of the skull.

The idea here in Roses 2 is also life and death: The fact that we pass this way once, so make the most of it.

When I recall the idea of mortality, one of my first profound experiences of the idea was through Shakespeare's sonnets.  He devoted an enormous amount of ink to the idea of "cheating" death by living a full life:  for him, one could create children, write, and have faith.  Those were three ways of creating a kind of immortality.  You still didn't get out of it alive, but you left a legacy.

So my second rose still life is a homage to Shakespeare, hence the complete works;  the eyeglasses (symbols of knowledge), the prickly rose stem (it doesn't always come easy) and the dead roses say it doesn't last forever.

Do not put flowers....part 2

The lilies are less spectacular than the roses.  They travel in packs.  It seemed to me they only revealed themselves when bunched together in a group; confined to a small space.  Maybe it's just me.

Never put flowers in your portfolio....1

Scott Kelby, a teacher and Photoshop expert advises "never to put flowers in your portfolio".

I think it's because everyone puts flowers in their portfolios and therefore:

a) art directors are so sick of seeing them they hurl,
b) since everyone does it, the odds are virtually certain that someone did better flowers than you and yours suck by comparison,
c) Botticelli had the final word on this in 1547.

So if you agree with Scott, you should find another blog to peruse for the summer.  Our front garden is given' 'er and it's liable to be a floral summer.

The rose bush is in flower (probably till November), the lilies are in and I like the way the Fujifilm X Pro-1 with the 60mm lens renders colour.

Jump off a cliff: part 2, the soft landing

The problem with self portraits is they can seem vain.  But the main reason people do them, I think, is to experiment and try things: either you wouldn't want to waste time with a model, or you just don't have a model handy.

It may be why photographers, and painters for that matter, have so many pictures of their younger kids, posed so artistically.

Kids are handy and you can pop them into the set and ask them to stand this way or that.  Until a certain age, they are fairly obliging.  Later, it's more of a cajoling game.  Till finally they tell you to pound salt, or words to that affect.

That's when the self portraits start in earnest....until the grandchildren arrive!