The Still-Life

Irving Penn

The still life has been around for centuries, used by artists in order to practice painting techniques. In photography however, we can manipulate many factors in a still life to create a pleasing composition using the elements and principles. Using lighting in the studio, we are going to make interesting compositions of very simple objects. The idea of this project is to get you used to artificial lighting and learn how to compose an interesting image. 

Resource: Still life pinterest board, 5 lighting tips for beginners

Assignment:
Your assignment is to photograph 50 frames of a still life. You will pass in 3 high quality images to google classroom from the shoot and print your most successful still life. You will manipulate lighting. You will also learn about ISO and shooting with a tripod. One final 8x10 print must be mounted on the front of black paper. 



Steps:

• Analyze your still life
• Manipulate the artificial lighting
• Set up a tripod for your camera
• Shoot a 50 digital frames (*Make sure your ISO is set at 400 for half the images, then play with ISO 800 and ISO 1600)
• You must have multiple angles and views of the still life and focus on one area, not the whole mess of a still-life
• You will cull down to your best 10 images and edit ALL 10 and make a contact sheet
• Then choose your best 3 images with Ms. Djordjevic

PASS IN:

• contact sheet of 10 edited images
• 3 top still life images as single files
• PRINT your best image

Objective: Use the camera to capture still life, both in studio and outside of the studio. Use lighting to enhance the image and shallow depth of field to focus on specific pieces of a composition.

​Resources: Still Life pinterest board