A Basket Case

26th Feb 09

I’ve always been a fan of shots that bring out the texture of the materials in the image. Mostly, they work really well as a black and white images.

Originally, I was going to shoot something different for today’s image but, as I was hunting in the under stairs cupboard for something that I needed, I spotted a woven shopping basket that I’d forgotten we had. I liked the texture of the weave and the bright colours, so I decided to shoot that instead.

I lit it with an umbrella, positioned to one side of the basket. I feathered the light coming in from the side to try to get an even illumination, whilst the side lighting also picked up the texture of the basket. For the final image, I just boosted the colours and contrast a little during processing.

Danger! High Voltage!

25th Feb 09

Whenever I see signs like that, it always reminds me of the song from Electric Six.

I saw the subject of today’s image near the car park that I use for work. I was intrigued by the number of warning signs, so I went over for a closer look (note to warning sign fitters: if you want people to keep away from something, don’t plaster it with warnings because it makes it look more interesting).

I liked the old industrial look of it, with the (seemingly broken) analogue dial on the front  and the imposing nature of the warnings. I shot it from a lower angle to make it look more imposing and also to create a nice angle with brickwork. I wanted to really highlight the danger signs so went for a selective colour approach and gave the b&w a high contrast. The signs were all different shades of yellow/orange so I hue-shifted them all to a bright yellow.

The resulting image gives the impression of danger both from the warning signs and from the yellow and black colour scheme.

Pancake Day

24th Feb 09

Since it is Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday) in the UK, I thought it would be a good idea to theme today’s Project 365 entry around that.

The pancakes were made by my other half, Becky, and enjoyed with some maple syrup and lemon juice. I also had one with Nutella as it would be rude not to!

The one for the photograph was made with the last of the mixture and then left to go cold for a while. The idea was to get a picture, using shallow focus, of the pancake with maple syrup drizzled on it. I tried a few shots with the pancake open, but it wasn’t really working as an image. I folded the pancake to see if that looked any better, but there was still something missing.  I decided to drizzle some of the syrup around the plate to make the background a bit more interesting and that got me the image I was looking for.