Still Life Photography is a photo of inanimate but usually meaningful and important objects such as food, religious objects and things which are close to the photographer. Still Life Photographs are usually meant for art and have a story or a meaning behind them, but they can also be used in industry for advertising and promotion of a certain product.
Vanitas
Vantitas
Art is a genre which focuses heavily on symbolism, mainly on
the symbolism of life and death. It features objects like
skulls, rotting food and decade flowers. This
is because it gets across to the viewer the idea of death and
the shortness of life. The term Vanitas comes from
the Latin word for vanity. It was a genre which got popular in the
16th - 17th century, it was most popular in Flanders (Belgium),
the Netherlands and some of France.
Irving Penn
Willem Kalf
Willem Kalf
was born in Rotterdam, worked in France and settled in Amsterdam. He was known
as one of the masters who photographed still life photos. The type of work he
did was 'pronkstilleven' which are displays of foods and objects which usually
have a meaning or some importance behind them.
John Blakemore
John Blakemore is a photographer born
in Coventry, in 1936, he travelled Libya while working for
the royal air force, it was then he discovered photography. Once
home he started photographing Coventry and its reconstruction after
the war. He is most famous for his landscape work and the works he has done
with still life mainly focusing on flowers and nature.
Ori Gersht
Ori Gersht is a photographer
who mixed the use of shutter speed with the style of still life. He made a
series of photos which involved still life things such as food and flowers
exploding, to capture the explosion he would use a fast shutter speed.
Magda indigo
Anatoly Che
Jenny Van Sommers
Jenny Van Sommers is a photographer who lives
is Sei in London, She frequently visits the US and France, she is a studio
photographer who photographs for a number of clients such as Apple, Audi,
Hermes and Nike, she also photographs for big magazines such as vogue and Dazed.
Robert Sulkin
Robert Sulkin first involvement in
photography first began in the early 1970's he started photographing in a
social landscape mode under famous photographer Robert Frank. When he started
an art history course he had taken at the graduate school in university of Iowa.
My Still life Photos
In
these photos it was the first time doing still life so everything was just
practice, we were experimenting with light and taking photos in different
angles to see what the final photo would end up like. Once we had tested out
different lighting and angles we decided to change the set up around, the first
time we changed it around there was no meaning behind it we just set it up
aesthetically. we also took some photos in black and white as well as
in colour this was to see how it would affect the final look with the
lighting. the photos above were done on a medium ISO this is because I wanted
to capture the photo in detail and I wanted to capture all of the different
textures and things in the photo, looking back on it I would have do it on a
high ISO because it would create more of a grainy image which would work well
with still life. The shutter speed was on 1/125 and the aperture was on 10 this
is so there was enough light to capture the things in the image but there
wasn't enough light to over expose it, although in some of the photos there is
a slight bit of over exposure, I have done this on purpose because I
think it contrasts well with the other side of the photo which involves a
lot of shadows and darkness. a lot of the still life photos I have taken are also in
black and white this was just to test what the final image would come out
like, after testing this I like the coloured photos more because of the
contrasts between the different ones i also like the photos in colour because it show off
the details and textures of each object more.
After we had had a go at setting the objects up
so they were just to appeal aesthetically I had a go at setting them up in a
meaning full way, in the photos below I set it up with a rock in the middle
which worked as a divider, on the left of the rock there was white and red
flowers which I wanted to represent life and on the right there are black
feathers and dead flower leaves, because the leaves are dead and the feathers
could be from a raven which are birds which represent death.
