Part 5 Narrative and Illustration – Project: Illustration by Juxtaposition

Exercise: Juxtaposition 1

I chose a fairly routine example for the juxtaposition example of the project. At my work in a Learning Centre, I quite often photograph students being presented  with their certificates of achievement. On this occasion, my colleague Allyson is pictured with a recently presented award. Normally these photos are made with the department’s compact digital camera in a fairly predictable way. I have used my DSLR and posed Allyson at a desk surrounded by all of the paraphernalia of “e-learning”. I removed the glass from the certificate frame to avoid reflections. I have lit the scene with window light from the left and fill-in flash from my on-camera flashgun. I have included both landscape and portrait orientations.

8864: 1/60s f5  ISO 400 40mm, Flash bounced  from white ceiling.

 

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8862: As above but lens at 32mm

Conclusion: This was a fairly straightforward exercise and although it was interesting to do, I didn’t find it much of a challenge. I will include the book cover illustration still life option too. That will be my next post.

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Exercise: Juxtaposition 2

I’ve had a bit of fun with this one. I’ve started off by doing a bit of beachcombing down on the Sussex coast to see if I could find anything interesting to photograph. Within 45 minutes I had collected an assortment of string, plastic, seaweed and a Polish beer can. I bought it all home and decided reproduce a beach set for a still life using a bag of pebbles that I had bought for the garden, some shells I had collected over the years and a blue cotton backdrop to represent the sky. I thought the bright saturated colours would add impact to a magazine cover for a fictional periodical. I added some text to put the image into context.
Lighting set up:
As shown below; two soft boxes, one above the set, the other to the left of the camera. An additional foil reflector was hand held to the right of the set to improve the highlighting of the bucket.

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8895: 1/125s f29 ISO200 32mm Manual mode, WB: Flash

The final image was laid out using MS Publisher and saved as a .jpeg image.

Although this mock up was a bit of fun, there is a serious message here about plastics in the oceans. The sheer volume out there is staggering and the impact on wildlife can be horrendous. See more here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-uncover-new-ocean-threat-from-plastics-1774337.html