Everything changes, weathers, grows or otherwise shows signs of transformation. Changes in the weather can create a drastic change in the appearance of a place. Cooking something changes it. People tend to look sprightly in the morning and worn out at night.
Make a sequence of photographs that shows the same subject, from the same position, but in different states. You can choose any subject you like, but clearly identify it and note down the conditions of change you want to show.
Produce at least three images in a sequence – a triptych – that shows the three states of the subject and communicates the change you’ve identified.
I had several different ideas for this exercise. Time would be a constraint to complete the work in the allotted time frame. The weather at the moment is fairly settled so it was difficult to record changes in the landscape. I could record the dramatic change of say a piece of bread being toasted which could be complete fairly quickly but really wanted to use the exercise to explore something unseen.
A bunch of flowers in the living room gave me the idea of photographing them over an extended period of time. They appear static and unmoving indoors, being unaffected by the wind. However, unless they are made of plastic, they must change and this gave me the idea to document what change takes place.
I bought some tulips as they are both colourful and relatively unfussy compared to an assorted bunch of flowers that would have different shapes and sizes. The project meant commandeering a space for the duration as the set up had to remain unaltered for the exercise. The dining room was the perfect spot.
I put the tulips in a ceramic vase to avoid any reflections and other problems with a glass one. A black felt backcloth which would emphasis the vibrant colours of the tulips. With my old canon camera on a spare tripod I experimented with the angle of view and decide that looking slightly down on the subject looked about right. I also played with the flash position to avoid shadows and eventually decided on a diffuser and bounced the illumination off the ceiling. The flowers had natural light during the daytime to keep the progression as natural as possible. To keep the lighting consistent the daytime shots were done with the curtains closed, relying on artificial light for the exposures.
7am, 3pm and 10pm were approximate time for exposures each day and this I repeated for the next 16 days. ISO800 and an exposure of 1/60sec at f16 gave me a good depth of field and these setting were kept through the exercise. The auto focus on the lens was switched off.
I was very pleased with the results (about 50 different exposures in all) and they required very little post production editing. The main adjustments were to crop to a square format to improve composition and a final sharpening. From the 50 exposures I have chosen 4 which I feel reflect the changes in the state of subject from fresh to finish.
I feel I have achieved the objective in recording the change that has taken place over the two weeks of photographing the tulips from the very fresh flowers straight from the florists to the decayed remnants. Flicking through the contact sheet I became interested in the animation it created as they danced around in the vase. This is something we don’t see as the change is very slow and perhaps more frequent exposures would track the changes better. Not having access to time lapse equipment made this difficult at best. I have however used the set of pictures and by experimenting created a short sequence to which I have added music fitting the sequence to some degree. This is a project for the future and will need some planning.
Contact Sheet: 3.4 Contact Sheet
Equipment Used:
Canon 5D
Canon EF 17-40mm Lens
Canon 580EX Flash gun
2 x tripods
ian's learning log 