Process

Our brief for this project was things people have given to you. Straight away my mind went to the plastic flower that my sister made for me and put in a ‘care package’ from home. I thought that it was very interesting visually. It is made out of plastic spoons and is imperfect, with small burn marks where she heated the plastic to bend it. I really liked that flowers are meant to represent life and beauty but this one is made out of artificial materials and has marks that show how violently it had to be forced into this shape; melted and twisted. Its very nature is a contradiction.

I then decided to build up my whole piece around this object. I went for the theme of flowers and I thought I could some how create a storyline of how society has gone from appreciating the real thing to trying to recreate it, to artificially making themselves better than it. I had a house plant, given to me by my mum when I moved to University, which I thought would be good for the first image in my tryptic, as the spoon flower would take the place of the second. When it came to finding the third object however I came across some issues.

I wanted something that embodied people taking the image of flowers and making it ‘better’. My first thought was of a piece of jewellery. The quote ‘to gild a lily’ was in my mind for this object. However, I don’t have that many things with flowers as a motif.

I found something that my sister had given me. It was a glass pendant with a flower made of glass within it. However it is very small and I couldn’t get it to look good on camera. I had no idea how to go about shooting it. See below

 

After my failure with this, I tried to rethink about what my message was. I wanted something artificially flowery. My next idea was perfume. Perfume is humans trying to make themselves smell more like flowers, but not on their own. Humans mix and add chemicals to make flowers smell better. I thought that this could communicate was I trying to get across with my tryptic. However, I don’t have any perfume bottles that are obviously flowery. I still wanted the flower motif to be strong within all my images and I thought that having a plain perfume bottle as my third image would disrupt the connection between all three objects. So instead I chose to photograph a bottle of dry shampoo. In a way I think this works even better, because unlike a perfume which is expensive and could be argued that humans are treating the flowers and the idea of flowers with reverence, this cheap bottle of dry shampoo shows that we have trivialised the beauty of nature and canned it. The journey would be complete. The process from a thing of natural beauty, with its faults and imperfections to a can of artificial fragrance, fake and stylised. I’m hoping that at least some of this comes through in my tryptic.

 Set up

I found it hard to get a set up for this project. This was mainly due to the day I chose to shoot being dark and overcast with rain. This meant that there was very little natural light in my front room. I had to use a reflector to try and get the most out of the daylight. In the end however, it was just too dark. So I had to use artificial light, something that had really wanted to avoid. For the pictures I wanted a very narrow depth of field, as I love how it makes photos seem more 3D. So I chose to use a very large apperture and a lens specifically for doing this.

For post production on the photos, I had to do quite a lost with the contrast and exposure of the pictures. I wanted the colours to really pop, but for there also to be some shadows. For some before and after images see below.