Serving suggestion

I normally expect manufacturers of foodstuffs to put effort into making their products attractive to potential consumers. The manufacturer's marketing departments sometimes illustrate the food contents with so-called "serving suggestions".

Here is my attempt at bettering the professionals.

Serving suggestion

Multiple exposure - triptych

A recent challenge from a local camera club was to produce a triptych - three images in one frame. The three images in a triptych should be related in some way. For example they might tell a story, have a common theme, or show three views of the same subject.

A favourite painting is "The Garden of Earthly Delights" - a triptych by the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, dated about 1500. Bosch's painting is very complex, full of fantasy, symbolism and metaphor. The painting is a mystery - today no one seems to have a full understanding of its meaning.

Inspiration for the camera club's challenge comes from Bosch's bizarre painting - it steals a few simple ideas as a basis. Here is the result:

 Triptych

A technical inspiration is the use of multiple exposures. I had been exploring the creative possibilities of multiple exposures, and testing a few ideas using fruit as the subject. Most of the triptych is composited from multiple exposures of fruit. Some examples:

In each case, the multiple exposure image has been created in-camera by a Canon 5D mark III in Darken" multiple exposure mode.

Multiple exposure - Abstract - for Alex

A life at sea

Shipwreck and rescue. This abstract image celebrates the life of Alexander Scott Masson who spent most of his adult life at sea.

Multiple exposure - Falls of Feugh

Spent an hour on the footbridge over the Falls of Feugh taking a large number of multiple exposure images. This image is from three images originally blended in camera, with some minor re-working in Photoshop (white balance, crop and sharpen).

 Blue Feugh

Multiple exposure

 Multiple exposure images of the past season's barley fields in Aberdeenshire.

Muir of Fowlis

Near Tough

Images are created in-camera with post-processing limited to crop, mono conversion and adjustments to exposure, contrast and clarity.

Intentional Camera Movement

The genre of Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) is not to everyone's taste, but the ICM images of Chris Friel and Valda Bailey are some of the most exciting photographic images that I have seen.

Over the last couple of years I have spent a few days exploring some of the possibilities of ICM. Despite the perception by some that ICM is "just waving the camera around" it really isn't that easy.

Classic starting points for ICM include groups of trees (slow vertical pans) and beaches (slow horizontal pans). It is relatively easy to get some pleasing images with these well-worn subjects, but my efforts with fully hand-held ICM (no tripod) have achieved a poor success rate. I have fired the shutter several hundred times in front of birch trees and now have three of four images that might be considered OK.

The nature of ICM means you do not have full control over the end image. There is inevitably a large element of chance in the end result. Control over the images is achieved mainly through the choice of appropriate shutter speeds, and appropriate camera movements while the shutter is open. Depending on the circumstances, shutter speeds between say 0.5s and 10 seconds might give optimum results. Post processing is also important, but this does not have to be complicated. Post processing can often be limited to careful cropping, and adjustments to white balance, contrast and clarity.

A few months ago I took some ICM images at Aberdeen railway station. I revisited the railway station a few days ago. Here are some of the results.

Lightbox images

Lightboxes are used to provide strong backlights. I've been experimenting with one such device to illuminate flowers and include the translucency of petals and leaves in images.

Poppy

This poppy came from my garden. I had been unsuccessful in trying to capture an image of a poppy with backlight and showing light through the petals. I brought the flower into the house where I could use a lightbox as a source of backlight. The lightbox was placed on the floor and the poppy was placed on the lightbox. The camera was tripod mounted with a cable release attached. Aperture was set to f/18 to ensure sharp image. A few trial shots showed that a short exposure in the order of 1/15s resulted in an image that was close to a silhouette of the flower with little colour visible, and a long exposure of 15s was sufficient to produce an image that was almost entirely burnt out.

Based on this, I decided that seven shots taken at 1-stop intervals would adequately cover the range of useful exposures - that fastest at 1/8s and longest at 8s. These seven shots were followed by one further shot with the lightbox switched off and using natural light through a window to obtain a normally exposed image.

The images were opened in Photoshop and stacked as layers (The relevant commands to do this are: File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack... Add Open Files, and tick the checkbox Attempt to Automatically Alight Source Images.) The darkest image, 1/8s exposure, was placed as the bottom layer and the extra shot with the lightbox switched off was placed at the top. It's handy to know the command to reverse the order of layers here: Layer > Arrange > Reverse.

Starting with the bottom darkest layer, each subsequent layer is processed in turn: a black layer mask is added to the next layer and a white brush is used manually to selectively paint in parts of the layer.

Orange poppy

Deconstructed orange poppy