Photographic Exploration of the Mobile –
Now that my ‘Balance of Power’ mobile is fully installed I can start to experiment photographically. Over the weekend I took a number of stills and I also shot some videos. Editing the videos will take a while longer. In the meantime I thought I’d share some of the stills.
I decided to shoot my stills using very specific camera settings. The mobile hides many things, therefore it was important to me to try and capture an air of mystery about it. For this reason I deliberately chose to use a very shallow ‘depth of field’. Indeed I was actually working with an f-stop of 1.8 (A very large aperture). What this means essentially, is that only a very narrow band of my image will actually be in focus. These narrow bands of focus can be seen in the images below.
I certainly had enough light streaming in through the windows to enable me to shoot at f-16 (the minimum aperture for my 50mm lens), however, I genuinely feel that the selective blurring adds something a little more mysterious to the images below. I feel that the images are much more atmospheric. I also chose to stick with a pure black and white aesthetic. This is because I liked the crisp clear lines created by the imagery and the mobile itself. I wanted to draw attention to the simplicity of the black and white designs and any additional colour grading felt like a pure distraction.
Narrow Aperture vs Wide Aperture
Below are two examples of a narrow aperture versus a wider aperture. The narrow aperture images are on the left and my preference for a wider aperture are on the right.
Colour Graded vs Original Image
I did experiment with some colour grading in order to add subtle colour and tonal changes to the still images. However, on reflection I felt that this just didn’t work as it detracted from the clean crisp black and white aesthetic. The images on the left have been subtly colour graded – I prefer the untouched original images on the right. They seem to be crisper and less distracting.
Photographic Stills
The following three images were perhaps three of my favourite images. I hope these images convey a sense of mystery? I also hope that the limited field of view (how much of the subject can be seen), will leave the viewer wanting to know more? It was my intention to gently frustrate the viewer via the lack of a full height image of the mobile in its entirety. I plan to address this, but currently I’m still working out the best angles from which to shoot.
Gallery of Stills
The following gallery contains the full selection of edited images shot using a larger aperture. My plan is to shoot a wide variety of images using various settings. I also plan to shoot a full length image of the mobile. However, this is the first series, in a planned line of both stills and video shoots.
Next Steps
The next steps in this exploration can be found in the ‘Visual Exploration Blog #2’.
