Quiet - Fine Art Meditative Photography
Exploring and re-creating classic darkroom tones:
During the Coronavirus lockdown, it's been an experience to stay at home and photograph a few local wild flowers, garden flowers and seed heads in a quiet and contemplative way. To fit with the contemplative theme, I've tried to achieve a soft and simple monochrome style by re-creating some classic darkroom and split tones.
Technical considerations.
1. Lighting indoors
Best lighting of all is to use soft, one-directional light from one window. Accept the black shadows as I do, or use a sheet of newspaper or white card to bounce back a little light into them.
2. Lighting outdoors
All these images were taken on an overcast day to capture the beautiful soft light or on a sunny day in the shade.
3. Kit
Don't worry too much about kit. With this Fine Art work, it's much more important to have an intuitive connection with the subject matter. An experienced photographer will quickly start to work intuitively with this kind of work but if you are inexperienced then the best advice is to slow down. Spend 15 minutes exploring and photographing one single flower and your perception will quickly increase.
You can do this type of photography with any kind of camera but to create images like the ones shown here with a soft background you will need a lens with a large aperture. I often use the small, cheap, micro 43 Olympus prime lenses such as the 45mm f1.8 or the Pen 40mm f1.4 together with the tiny Olympus macro attachment. Many of these images below were taken whilst playing with a couple of old £20 car-boot sale lenses; a Takumar 55mm-f1.8 and also a Helios 58mm-f2. These lenses can be attached to any mirrorless camera body with a cheap Chinese helicoid adapter (helicoid allows macro focussing).
4. Processing
To get the subtle monochrome darkroom tones, I processed the images in Silver Efex software. This style can also be created in Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom), but it's a little bit harder to get the right "Look". I'll put some instructions in a new portfolio at the bottom of the gallery page, showing how to achieve this look.
During the Coronavirus lockdown, it's been an experience to stay at home and photograph a few local wild flowers, garden flowers and seed heads in a quiet and contemplative way. To fit with the contemplative theme, I've tried to achieve a soft and simple monochrome style by re-creating some classic darkroom and split tones.
Technical considerations.
1. Lighting indoors
Best lighting of all is to use soft, one-directional light from one window. Accept the black shadows as I do, or use a sheet of newspaper or white card to bounce back a little light into them.
2. Lighting outdoors
All these images were taken on an overcast day to capture the beautiful soft light or on a sunny day in the shade.
3. Kit
Don't worry too much about kit. With this Fine Art work, it's much more important to have an intuitive connection with the subject matter. An experienced photographer will quickly start to work intuitively with this kind of work but if you are inexperienced then the best advice is to slow down. Spend 15 minutes exploring and photographing one single flower and your perception will quickly increase.
You can do this type of photography with any kind of camera but to create images like the ones shown here with a soft background you will need a lens with a large aperture. I often use the small, cheap, micro 43 Olympus prime lenses such as the 45mm f1.8 or the Pen 40mm f1.4 together with the tiny Olympus macro attachment. Many of these images below were taken whilst playing with a couple of old £20 car-boot sale lenses; a Takumar 55mm-f1.8 and also a Helios 58mm-f2. These lenses can be attached to any mirrorless camera body with a cheap Chinese helicoid adapter (helicoid allows macro focussing).
4. Processing
To get the subtle monochrome darkroom tones, I processed the images in Silver Efex software. This style can also be created in Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom), but it's a little bit harder to get the right "Look". I'll put some instructions in a new portfolio at the bottom of the gallery page, showing how to achieve this look.
Return to: Gallery
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Return to: Gallery