Black and White

Our first competition for this year was Black and White. I love this competition because the only guideline is the colour and you can enter anything you like.  I chose to enter images that were taken in the last year. 

One image I chose was of seed pods.  They can look menacing or dangerous or otherworldly.  I found a whole pile of them outside our community centre months ago and collected them thinking that I would eventually make an image of them. I went home that day and started to consider how I would photograph them.  My husband carved a dome for me out of styrofoam and I painted it black then went about threading the stems of the seed pods into the dome.  I placed it on a black back ground and started photographing away.  As I spent more time looking at this group of seed pods I noticed how the group of them actually looked a lot like one of the individual seed pods, I thought I would make a diptych out of them.  But I wasn't happy with how it looked I wanted them closer to each other. I ended up cutting each image in half and had them touching and lined up.  I loved how they turned out.  Click on the image to zoom in.

Portfolio Competition

One of my most favourite of all the competitions our photo club has is Portfolio. 

The goal of this competition is to show the versatility of the photographer.  Ideally, the photographer would enter three images that show three different genres of photography. 

As you probably know from previous posts, I really enjoy doing food photography and portraits.  So, two of my entries were portrait and food.

The portrait image is a quiet portrait I photographed in studio with butterfly lighting.  I placed my strobe above and centred on my models face so that she would have that lovely tiny shadow under her nose.

I have posted this image before but it was modified previously, so wanted to show the image as I entered it into this competition.

The food image I entered was one that had been brewing for quite some time.  I had been quite fascinated by the colours found in blood oranges when they are cut open.  I managed to find some blood oranges at the veggie shop and decided this was my chance.  They ended up being quite difficult to work with as they stained everything around them.  I chose to change my focus to strawberries but keep the blood oranges in the images as a supporting role.  I also hid a little nod to my son who loves video games in my image with sugar cubes in the shape of tetris blocks.

I found the third image to be quite difficult as I wanted it to be different but also sort of inline with the theme of the other images.  I finally decided on more of a design study which included abstract images that were in effect macro images of Paua shells.  I was inspired by a quilting pattern I had seen recently, so decided to go with a Paua Quilt design.

I hope you enjoy these images and are able to see the pinkish, reddish and black theme that unifies these images: