still life experience

Do you know what you are looking at? I do. I am pretty sure that this is my very first intentional still life. It was an interesting process of thought, trial and error, more thought and more trial to get the shot to this point. I have been wanting to take a photo of flowers in this vase for some time now and in my mind, I wanted to create a still life painting with my camera.

I started by running around the house collecting props. I put them against my favorite wall and re arranged them a few times until I was happy. The early shots pretty much are typified by the image above. Definitely missing something. Can you believe that this wall is really purple? You can still see traces of the offending violet in the lower part of the image.

I then decided that the image needed something to make it feel more lush and maybe softer & added the orange cloth (We have a surprising amount to cloth in our home due to my wife's belly dancing costume collection). I thought the cloth did the trick to a large extent but I thought the hue, saturation and luminosity (remember the three parts of color from a previous post?) were all out of whack and were steeling the focus from the vase. So, back to photoshop where I changed the hue to a yellow and then adjusted the saturation and brightness to tone it down and make it look more like gold. I also decided that I really should let the table show

I have definitely left my comfort zone with this project and that is not a bad thing. I can't think of a better way to learn than to step out and try something new. From beginning to end, I put about six hours into this project and took over one hundred images to get it just the way I wanted it. The important thing is that I had a vision and followed it, slight detours and all.

Anybody know where I can sign up for lessons in arranging flowers?

Finally, I thought I would close with the following image showing how my cat, Betty, wanted to get in on the process. Consider it a not so still life. How is that for a purple wall?

Have a great day folks & don't forget to follow your vision.