YOU GUYS, photography is hard. This subject broke me. We don’t have a live show this week to base my blog off of, so I decided to do something “easy”, still life. Here’s a great video Chelsea made to teach you the basics:
I was sick this weekend and leaving the house was an impossibility, so I thought “hey, I have stuff! I can just do a still life!” But no. I think this project broke me.
We have no shortage of interesting looking objects in my house, and a ton that are meaningful, so that part didn’t seem so hard. What was hard was finding a backdrop and lighting. First I tried putting everything on a leather chair. But nope! Everything was slanted and cramped.
Dark! Cramped!
Then I put everything on my dining room table, but that’s just silly because the background is a wall or my kid’s toys or the kitchen.
No, Siobhan. Why? So dark. Such hard overhead light.
Then, in a last ditch effort I used by bedroom rug, with a duvet as the backdrop. The lighting was better, natural light off to the left, dim lamp to the right, but the backdrop became the bane of my existence. It was so wrinkly. SO WRINKLY. I swapped out some of my original objects to a few that wouldn’t swallow the light (that dark wood and dark metal weren’t doing me any favors) and added some flowers and feathers to add a leading line back to the globe. But then I spent well over an hour trying to blur/smooth/blend the background so that it wouldn’t look so distractingly wrinkled. To no avail. So here, friends, is me giving up:
I just… ugh. I can’t even.
So there you have it: some old dirty stuff that represents my family? I’m sorry guys. Oof.
