Happy New Year

©2013HannahBennett

Hello Everyone!

Really quick post today as I just wanted to wish you all a happy new year, I hope you're all enjoying yourselves! 

See you all in 2014 for more blogging :)

[ p.s if you want to know how I took this firework photograph, check out this blog post here where I've written a handy little tutorial on how to achieve great images of fireworks :) ]

Karl Blossfeldt Inspired

About a month ago now, I wrote a blog post about well-known photographer Karl Blossfeldt, which can be found here if you missed it and would like to find out more about him. (Might be worth checking out if you're not familiar with his work otherwise this post may be quite confusing for you.) I mentioned at the end of the post that I felt very inspired by the style of his work and wanted to create a photograph of my own but in a similar style to Karl. Now that I have finally got round to doing so I have included the result below.

©2013HannahBennett

Although Blossfeldt focuses very much on the natural form, patterns, and markings of natural objects, he mostly focuses on plant life so I opted for a shell as my subject matter instead. I felt that this would work well because it's an extremely beautiful natural object. As Blossfeldt is quite an old photographer, he was shooting before digital cameras were introduced, his images were quite grainy due to the high film speeds he would have been using. To create a similar effect throughout my image, i shot this at ISO 800 to introduce the right amount of grain. ISO 100 resulted in too smooth an image, and ISO 3200 made the image ridiculousy grainy and reduced the amount of texture captured from the shell.

Blossfeldt never intended for his images to be appreciated on a photographic level, he was a lecturer and simply photographed plant life to show his students different specimens. Because of this his images are highly detailed and give very reliable representations of each plant species. To display my shell as reliably as possible, I used a high number f stop, f/32 to be precise, to create a deep depth of field across the whole frame.

Overall, I was very pleased with the outcome of this image, I like the amount of detail that I have captured and am pleased with the wide tonal variety across the images as a result of this.

Thanks for reading, I hope you liked the image, and I hope I've inspired you to check out Karl Blossfeldt's work and maybe try taking some images of your own in his style :)