It's been such a long time since I studied fine art from a drawing and painting perspective but recently I've found myself being more interested in using the same techniques in my photography. There are many key elements within this genre and they are all as important as each other. They are; the objects themselves, the arrangement or composition of those objects and the lighting. You may get a pleasing image by achieving 2 out of the 3 main elements but you should always strive to get as near to perfect as you can. After all, that's what fine art is about. The inclusion or exclusion of the background is another consideration. As an example of background inclusion, you may notice that in the background of an image, there is a tiny pair of mittens on a window sill and this may seem like the artist forgot to move them. The likelihood is that they are being used as a metaphor for something such as, a small child who is important to them and will probably add more context to the main painting or image.
For this image, the main objective was to create a memory of someone very close to me, who recently passed away. There are lots of meanings for objects within still life and if you know a little about the context in which an image was created, it can open up a whole world of understanding and gain an insight into the story. Each of the objects in the image portray their own meaning and I'll describe that shortly. Firstly, let's look at the image itself.
To analyse the meaning I'll run through each of the objects and their traditional metaphors and then explain how putting these together in this way tells an even more detailed story:
The Lilies: A symbol of femininity and purity
The Watch: Symbolises the passage of time
The Candle: Candles symbolise life when lit, this one is extinguished.
The colour Red: Symbolises passion
The Flute Glass: Fragility
Water: Purity, Life
Let's look a little closer:
The Lilies symbolise a delicate, female form. The extinguished candle indicates death, the smoke shows us that this has been a recent event. The fact that it is red shows us that life was full of passion and love. The fragile glass containing only half a glass of water denotes the fragility and preciousness of life but also reminds us it may be short-lived. Finally, the watch again indicates that time is always ticking but in this case the time has stopped at 10:12 14 which is the date my gran passed away.
As for the composition, the lilies create a frame and some background to the other objects. I have placed the wine glass on the right of the image using the rule of thirds to give some stability to the lilies on the left. The red candle is small but because it is vibrant it jumps out, so I placed this in the foreground to give the image some depth. The watch is placed near the centre as a resting spot for the eye. I added some texture and some balance of warm colour with the fabric to finish the framing.
Lighting-wise, I used a speedlight on a light stand and shot through a brolly at about 45 degrees to camera-left. I added a large, silver reflector to camera-right to bring up the shadows and also light around the back of the objects a little to give them more depth. Sounds quite simple but can take many shots and fine adjustments to get the right look.
Editing was done mainly in Lightroom, just brought up the whites and darkened the blacks to get the right levels of contrast I was after. I removed some dust specs from the base using Photoshop and increased the highlights on the smoke by using the dodge tool to give it more definition.
And that's about it! Hopefully you found it interesting and it may give you more to think about the next time you're at an art gallery.
