Category: 6. Viewpoint

Unfortunately I came down with a sudden flu earlier during the week and lost a bit of time so I’m going to try and get a lot of work done over the weekend.

For this exercise I needed to arrange a collection of objects based on a theme. I needed to do a visual study by photographing them from several different angles in an exploratory way, and then do the same thing again but through sketching. Finally I needed to choose the most successful composition, justify it, and recreate it in pencil in a larger format.

For the theme I chose the morning after.  I used a near empty bottle of wine, a box of paracetamol and two cigarette butts. This was my attempt at humour.

Here are the photographs I took.

Here’s the sketchbook pages for my sketch studies.

I found the process for this one really interesting. It made me realise the complexities of composition, not just in terms of arrangement, but also viewpoint. Raising or lowering the viewpoint, angling the frame relative to the objects, going very close up or far away, it all changes the composition in interesting ways. It was also a great exercise for practising perspective, capturing the same objects in the same position relative to each other in different ways. I’d like to repeat similar versions of the exercise in future for practise. It also tied together the information built on in the first exercise on image space in a very hands-on, practical way.

Here is the image that I found most successful.

I like the way the camera focused on the gritty, gross texture of the cigarettes and the position of the paracetamol in the background is really pleasing. I think it captures the theme very well.

I thought the most effective vantage points in general were the ones that were very close to the ground and utilising unusual angles and combinations of closeups and skewed focus. These all contributed to the idea the morning after being something kind of disturbing, uncomfortable, maybe embarrassing.

Here’s my drawing of this image.

It was difficult to render the different textures, there’s some really challenging things going on, between the weird filter texture, the ash, glossy pillbox and glass bottle, all challenging to portray in graphite. But I’m pretty happy with the result, this isn’t how I would have initially chosen to do this still life but I found the process very enlightening.