Beauty in the Detail

For this project I decided to go down the route of still life and focus on macro photography. I decided on this as I believe that there is beauty in everything, and we don’t always see these details. With our busy, hectic lifestyles we don’t have the time to stop, look and admire the true beauty of an object, so my aim was to try and capture this through my photography.

 I began by looking at flowers and thought about going down a more commercial style of photography. I found it quite hard to photograph the flowers as there was either an imperfection with the flower or it just wasn’t quite ‘perfect’. Because of this I had to take into consideration the positioning of the flower, what part I would focus on and the lighting I used. I experimented with using both colour and black and white to see what effect it would have on the final image. I found that by using Black and white it removes the distraction of colour and helps you to focus on the shapes and patterns of the petals.

From flowers I then moved onto pencil crayons, again with a more commercial feel to the images. With pencils I found that I could be more creative in the way I arranged them on a surface and the angles at which I shot them from. As I was using branded crayons in my shot, I had to think about the placing of them so that in one of the shots you could see the name. This would then allow for the photos to be used for advertising purposes.

After experimenting with the commercial side of macro photography I tried going for a more artistic approach and tried photographing oil on water. This technique again allowed me to be more creative with the shot and produce an abstract effect. By simply placing a different image under the Perspex dish, I was getting a different result each time and an image that looked layered.