At this month’s camera club workshop we were trying out close-ups and still life with an emphasis on backgrounds and settings:
The subject is a small boat made from driftwood by a local artist Paul Howard.
For the setting we were improvising as we went along and in this case used some mottled dark blue material as the sea. This we ruffled up a bit to make ‘waves’ and to hide the bottom of the boat so it didn’t look like is was just plonked down on a piece of cloth. The sky was a piece of pale blue material. We were quite pleased with the overall effect although it took a few goes to get it right.
This is how a second model looked in the same setting:
Again, this has worked quite well although the colours don’t complement the background as well as the red and white does.
Then one of my colleagues started playing with a piece of wood that we were photographing earlier and came up with this:
This was quite pleasing but I though about having a ‘Titanic’ moment so we came up with this:
Overall we were pleased with the effect but some of the texture of the material forming the sky is showing. Due to the size of the material forming the sea we couldn’t move the background any further back. I need to get a larger piece.
Finally, this is a view of the setup we were using. The location is a small village hall, the flashguns are old hammer-head types bought second-hand off eBay. Everything is set up on an old wooden table.
