Still Life Photography Using Glass
Here are a couple of ideas using the transparency of glass to give some very simple but effective design images. Glass, light and imagination - that's all you need.
You've probably got loads of glass at home. Things you wouldn't normally look twice at - bottles, lightbulbs, vases, glasses, and possibly in different colours too. Whatever you decide to use though, make sure to give it a good polish before you start - thumbprints and greasy butter marks are much easier to remove beforehand than in Photoshop!
The first one is simply using the gentle curve of the side of a blue glass bottle with light shining through it to project onto some white card behind it. I've also deliberately kept right to the side to avoid any reflections, and the resulting image is this:
Fig 1 - BLUE GLASS
Canon EOS 300D
1/13 @ f/1.8 DISO 50mm prime
You can see a gentle hint of pale colour extending out from the bottle, and I could have painted over that so as to have a completely white background right up to the deep blue but I liked that faint wash of colour.
To present it I wanted to concentrate on the simplicity of the composition and to keep it as uncluttered as possible. By using 1 pixel framing on only the right edge and the bottom edge holds the subject of the photograph in a right angle and gives it a sense of space and air, and is the sort of idea that can be used as a graphic as well as a very peaceful, quiet image. Imagine it at A1 size perhaps, dominating a plain wall. Think big. Photographs don't always have to be full of detail and subject matter - sometimes a very simple suggestion of an idea is enough to make it an image that people want to look at and think about.
The second photograph again is deliberately simple and uncluttered. It's a clear lightbulb held up against the main light to give just the outline and the main elements of its shape and structure.
Fig 2 - LIGHTBULB
Canon EOS 300D
1/800 @ f/1.8 DISO 100 50mm prime
Once I'd got the image into Adobe Photoshop Elements I cropped it to exclude everything but the light and the lightbulb, and then using white as background colour extended the canvas by 100 pixels (width only) so as to open it out. Then the levels were adjusted to bring out more contrast.
You can use as much imagination as you like in this - I tried inverting it and playing with neon colours, and also colourised it with blue - taste is very personal and subjective so in the end it comes down to what you like in an image. Personally I liked the stark contrast of black and white so that's what I ended up using.
To get the base line I simply copied the image and placed it on a new black layer two pixels longer than the original but the same in width, and pasted it back on, using the 'move' tool to shift it up so that only the bottom edge showed. Layers were then flattened.
To have the whole thing sitting on a white canvas I then selected white as the background colour again, extended the canvas by 100 pixels on width and height, and ended up with a very simple graphic image.
And that's it. A bit of glass, some imagination, and a free afternoon. Anything is possible.
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Still Life Photography
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