Photo Project II

In my photographic collection, I chose to explore the idea of new objectivity. I have always been interested in how photography can give life and beauty to even the most ordinary objects, and this set of photos reflects that. I enjoy playing around with objects and photographing them from different angles, in different lighting, and using macro lenses. I was especially inspired by the work of Karl Blossfeldt and the way in which his photographs depict ordinary objects in such an interesting way that sometimes even renders them unrecognizable. He focuses particularly on plants and other objects in nature, which I also chose to focus on. Blossfeldt's photography, however, displays these objects out of their natural habitat, usually against a plain white or gray background. Some of my images portray the same concept, but others are of objects in nature that remain in their natural habitat. Blossfeldt also used the technology of his camera to magnify the images and give them a sharp appearance, which opposes pictorialist approaches to photography. I employed the macro lens feature of my camera in order to obtain detailed, close up images of the objects I chose. This allows for intense views of surface patterns and features, so that even simple, seemingly uninteresting objects appear vivid and wonderfully detailed. Although Blossfeldt did not put as much emphasis on the quality and features of nature itself, I enjoyed searching for ordinary objects and manipulating aspects of the capturing process in order to make them appear complex and interesting.  The first image simply shows a bare tree, which, to the naked eye, did not appear very special.  However, through looking at the photographed depiction, the many branches give it an incredibly intricate appearance.  The rest of the photographs show close-up views of simple objects in nature.  The combination of the macro lens with flash or natural light reveals details unable to be seen by the naked eye, like the droplets on the spider web and the fuz on the leaf.  The purple flower has a velvety appearance, which was my favorite effect of this approach.

   

Photographic Elements

The first element I chose to explore was texture.  The jungle gym that I photographed contained a vast array of surfaces, all of which created a wonderful sense of texture.  I found that getting up really close to particular surfaces and projections while using the macro lens feature allowed for very detailed images, strongly displaying their tiny detailed features.  Even something considered as ugly as paint chipping off of a pole, or rubber getting old and cracking off of the foundation appears beautiful in the context of images strongly portraying texture.  The third image, which I took a lot of time snapping many pictures of, was of the bottom of one of the slides.  Many of the pictures I took of it almost looked like skin.
I found that other elements, such as lighting, were being incorporated into my images without me even realizing it at first to enhance the textural appearance.  Overall, after experimenting with all of the elements, texture was the one most relevant to my object and gave it the most life.  I found it so difficult to narrow it down to just three images that I left a fourth here because they are all wonderful! 

  

For this portion, I studied the lines of the object, both within the physical structure as well as the ones casted by shadows.  The first image displays structural lines, because they are within the nature of the building.  The middle image is an example of lines as a pattern, where the sun is manipulating the lighting onto the poles so that it casts a repetitive, line-patterned shadow.  The last line image incorporates both.  I thought it looked neat the way the directional lines meet the structural lines.  Overall, I thought that lines found within the gym gave these particular images a structured look, rather than a playful toy.

  

  

  

  

  

I found unity through repetition in the preceding three pictures.  The first two show different ground surfaces of the jungle gym, both of which contain patterns of holes.  I played around getting different angles of the first shot, which all came out pretty neat and even seemed to give off a bumpy-like texture.  I found that images taken from an angle close to the surface itself, rather than from the top (like a bird's eye view), came out better and gave the image more depth.  It is also interesting to note that the x-o playboard was already set the way it is seen in this image upon my arrival, giving me an opportunity to capture repetition without even manipulating anything.  The uniformity of these images makes them seem simpler, yet fun to look at.

Although all three of these pictures, which emphasize lighting, are unique through the use of shadows rather than different light sources and angles, I found them to be the most interesting.  The first one I feel allows the viewer to really see all the surfaces displayed in the image.  I took this picture from a bird's eye view (as best as my height would allow), which lets you see the sun shining directly down, gleaming off of the metal of the poles and the reflection on the slide.  I thought that the shadow casted on the pole in the second image gave a nice pattern, allowing you to see light only through the holes of the ground above it.  Similarly, the last image incorporates the same effect, but on the ground instead.  I really enjoyed how the unevenness of the sand gave the illusion of wavy lines from the shadows.

Photographic Perspectives