Still Life

Artist Statement

I had a lot of options when taking the original image relating to still life—somehow, I still found myself stuck. I wanted to try to represent alliteration through this image, which meant I wanted to utilize repetition, or the same object and/or patterns being shown throughout the image. I tried photographing many different objects from different angles, but wasn’t happy with either the composition or the angle of the images because they weren’t very interesting. I also struggled with the organization of repeating objects, so I decided to try taking photos of a cabinet in the dining room that already had the objects inside lined up neatly. There, I supposed I could play with composition in other ways with the placement of the objects themselves already set. I began photographing at different angles and the image I settled on out of the many I took was the one where I took the approach of almost dividing the image in half, but having the same objects in both halves. To make it slightly more interesting and have the composition be a little less uniform despite the repetition going on, I took the photo at an angle and focused on the shelf in between the plates rather than the plates themselves, so the designs were slightly blurry.

For the editing process, I wanted to mostly focus on making the image as interesting as possible with what I had. My first instinct was to look through the filters, so I imported the image to photoshop and opened the filter gallery. The watercolor filter darkened the shadows of the image and added a bit of texture (although there were already shadows in the image, so I reduced shadows to a value of 1). I then applied the smudge stick filter, slightly reducing the intensity and bringing up the value of the brush stroke length. Finally, on top of both other filters, I applied the glass filter, setting the texture to “canvas” and bringing up the value of the distortion feature. For all of these filters, I tried to increase the texture and distortion of the image to make it more interesting, but I didn’t want to do so to the point of the image becoming too abstract. If it were difficult to tell what the image was capturing, I might lose the repetition of objects I was going for to contribute to what the image represents. After applying the filters, I added another layer, and used the gradient tool to apply a very faint gradient from black fading into white over the image diagonally. This emphasized the shadows in one corner of the image a little more and gave the image a more “distant” feeling, like the glass filter did as well as the other filters I applied. My final step in photoshop was adding a border around the image by using the brush tool at about 80% opacity (to keep the lines smooth, I used the selection tool to create a very thin rectangle for each edge of the photograph as I went). I found that the border made the image stand out a little more.

In the photos app, I made a few other small photo edits—I reduced the black point slightly to keep most of the shadow effects but reduce the intensity of the dark top corner of the image, I increased the saturation and contrast slightly to bring out the blurry patterns on the plates inside the cabinet, and I increased the cast to make the colors of the image a little warmer. My original plan was to put the image in black and white, but I found that putting everything into grey reduced the clarity of the more blurry parts of the image to the point where it lost some of the contrast that made it more interesting.

As stated in the beginning of this artist statement, the image is intended to represent the literary device of alliteration, where words placed close together in a sentence begin with the same letter or sound. To achieve this, I wanted the most obvious feature in my photo to be repetition. This is why I chose subjects of my image carefully despite somewhat lacking inspiration to capture images with only what I had at my house. By representing alliteration through repetition, the final image connects with my personal concentration of representing literary devices through photography. While creating the image I found that I struggle with still life photography more than I do portrait photography, and I’m reluctant to create images that are more abstract (I would like to improve on this as I move forward and try a lot of different editing styles and compositions).