Still life

To create a great photographic still life, the choice of the objects, the placement of the objects within the frame and how the light interacts with those objects is key.

Anybody who has tried to place a number of inanimate objects together for a still life, will know how difficult it is to come up with something new and dynamic and here the photographer has achieved this superbly.

I love the fact the photographer has taken something which is intrinsically square and flat and has cleverly manipulated it in such a way that they have removed all evidence of straight lines or edges, to produce a wonderfully curved abstract image.

Technically the image is of a very high standard and I would struggle to find fault with it. The photographer has shown great control of the depth of field as the image has a lovely crisp sharpness to all the edges and the use of the soft back light with the correct exposure has produced a fantastic tonal range.

A great idea, expertly executed and I would happily have this image hanging on my wall at home.

There were many still lifes of flowers submitted into this competition, but few matched up to this particular image. I love the way the photographer has composed the image, with the flower sitting just above the interlocking leaves, which has created the perfect natural backdrop for the flower. The image has just the right amount of depth of field to make the flower stand out from the background while the soft lighting has perfectly picked out the undulating contours of the leaves, which in return makes the sharp prickly petals of the flower stand out in further. The photographer’s excellent choice to go black & white also means we forced to focus on the beautiful but complex form of the flower and in return we are not distracted by its colour. The correct exposure of the image and excellent post production has given the image it a wonderful tonal quality. This image gets top marks for choice of subject, composition and lighting.

I really do like this particular entry in the competition. I love the way the photographer has simply used whites and pinks in the image and has cleverly kept the lighting soft to work with those tones available. Over-exposing the image has kept the whites nice and clean, though they have still managed to cleverly keep some tonal detail in the back ground, which I feel helps with the composition and balance of the image. This image would have scored higher, but for the fact the photographer has cropped off the bottom of the very cute cut glass bowl! For me the composition would have worked better if we could have seen the bottom of the bowl and a touch of the foreground, which would have brought the sweets up higher into the frame, so the bowl and the sweets could dominate the image better.

Overall, I like what the photographer was trying to achieve here, but feel it needed a little more work on the composition. I love that the photographer has given us so many different food types, arranged linearly in the same glassware. The image has a delicious range of shapes, textures and colours for our eyes to play with, which is so important when shooting food and that mixed with the moody backlighting and the creative post production effects, it has given the image plenty of atmosphere. As a criticism, I think I would have preferred the middle glass on the right to contain something a little more dramatic than a plain liquid. Perhaps if it was swapped with pistachio nuts from the back row, it might have worked better. Also, with an image with a very short depth of field, it’s important to make sure the focus point is bang on. For me, I would have liked to have that point to be right on peak of the brown powder in the glass on the left, which is where my eye naturally goes too. It’s probably only a half a centimetre out, but when shooting so close up, it can really make image.