Articles - Still Life
Photographing guitars is difficult, as I discovered during a frustrating, but ultimately fruitful excercise in photographing one of my guitars today. Why are guitars difficult to photograph? Well, they make great subjects, and are rich with beautiful colours, patterns and details; but many of them are highly reflective, which makes lighting them, or capturing them [ continue reading ]
Today I attended a macro photography workshop and practical shooting session hosted by Timothy Poulton. After a morning disussing gear and techniques, we all headed out for lunch and a few drinks, followed by a shoot in the Royal Botanic Gardens, where we looked for insects and other interesting subjects to photograph. I am still [ continue reading ]
It has been a while since I shot a macro image. Photo macrography is a form of photography which has traditionally frustrated me, because it is very challenging in terms of depth of field. My past efforts have produced images where focus is very selective, and with a 180mm macro lens at minimum focus distance, it [ continue reading ]
This afternoon I decided to shoot a still life image of a prized possession. This is the rare and much-coveted Penfolds Bin 620 Coonawarra Cabernet Shiraz 2008. This particular 'Special Bin' wine has only been released twice in Penfolds' history: the first vintage was 1966, and the second and current is the 2008 vintage, released [ continue reading ]
Lately we have been buying and drinking a lot of wine. Tough life, I know. The cellar — actually a climate-controlled refrigerator specifically for wine — has got rather full, and I have lately felt inspired to photograph some of the good stuff. For inspiration I had been looking at other marketing-style images of wine [ continue reading ]
It has been a few weeks since I have been out for a photoshoot, and this afternoon I felt a desire to create an image. I decided to re-visit water droplet macro photography, so I set about rigging a 'studio' to shoot some water droplets of water. Here is the result: In my initial setup [ continue reading ]