First Shoot

Having spoken to Mark in order to get some idea of the different contrasting pieces we have to produce, I decided to attempt my first shoot.

I had been into Queens Gardens with a couple of carrier bags and collected up some fallen leaves and some of the windfall crab apples from off the ground.

At home I set up my studio room, with my MPP large format on a tripod, using my adapter plate and canon 5D mk2.

The two main difficulties in using this set up are as follows.

1. While the full frame sensor is the same size as a HD10 the trouble is the crop factor. I have a standard 180mm lens with my mpp, which while that would be an excellent choice for shooting with 5x4 film, the crop factor of using 35mm frame is extreme to say the least. This means that in order to get a reasonable framing of the subject, I had to be as far back in my space as possible... which leads into the second problem...

2. Because I had to position myself so far back in order to frame my subject, I had to focus the camera close to it's infinity setting. (i.e. the lens and the camera sensor were very close together..) This then had an effect on how I was able to apply camera movements due to the fact that the closed up bellows restricted their flexibility.

Snap of how I set up my first vanitas shoot

Having taken this into account, I decided to initially try framing using the sliding camera plate. (using more then one 35mm exposure to create the frame). However I found that this restricted what I could do compositionally...

Next, I used a .25 wide angle adapter on the front of my lens to give a wider field of view. This did work, and i was able to arrange my set in order to create an attractive composition. and shot some exposures working on both positioning the light and the objects.

It was at this point that I felt my composition was lacking in something.. I was using candles, and i had one of my skulls. I felt that the piece needed another more narrative element to suggest some kind of motive for what i was doing...

I looked around the house, and found the prop gun I used from when I was in Calamity Jane at the New Theatre. I placed it into the composition, and immediately i felt it had given the piece a sense of tragic irony. I now looked at the piece and it seemed to say something about violent, perhaps that this was worthless death that was a waste.

The problem with this method was the wide angle adapter I was using was giving quite considerable colour aberrations so the quality of the images were sub standard. I then decided to move the camera to as far back as possible.. and also re-compose the subjects into a tighter group to make the frame.

So after some final slight adjustments to the lights, composition and exposure i settled on my final image composition.

(.....an image shot using the wide angle adapter)

Movements.

I used movements in the camera, at first of all I wanted to use a front tilt backwards in order to put the candles out of focus, but in the end decided to have a slight tilt forward towards the back of the scene in order to help with focusing the foreground.

I took several exposures and eventually settled on one that was taken at 1/6 sec at f/16 with an ISO of 3200.

Canon 5d mk2 set up on rear of MPP 5x4 camera.

Post Production was limited to adjusting levels and I cropped the image at the bottom to eliminate some dead space in the picture.

I think it has turned out relatively satisfactory, and in the end I feel I have produced a high quality image that fulfils the brief and shows a degree of creativity.

While I feel this image does represent a traditional vanitas piece, I think it also has another dimension. The gun not only balances up the composition, it makes the viewer ask questions as to both the meaning of the piece and the identity of the skull.