Artist Research- Malcolm Easton
Within this series of images Easton photographs domestic household objects that have been disposed of due to being broken. Within his work he aims to portray a sense of loss and a theme of old memories. I like Easton’s work because I think the objects stand out against the black background, really bringing out the details of the broken cracks within the subjects he has photographed. In terms of lighting his subjects, Easton uses a studio like environment with an artificial light source, and he also uses a hand held mirror to reflect the light on to his subjects in order to create a softer light effect on the subjects. He usually photographs one object within an image, however like in the image of mugs below he sometimes incorporates multiple of the same object in order to create a more interesting composition.
https://www.lensculture.com/malcolm-easton
My Still Life Images-
These two images that I have selected are my favourite from the still life images I took. The stopwatch was a borrowed object from a friend, it belonged to her great grandfather and has been passed through her family. The little old bear was something I found in a charity shop, I thought it would make an interesting image due to its worn down texture and the fact it only has one eye makes it look like its seen better days. In terms of the setup for capturing these images I created a mini home studio, to do this I used a black sheet and laid this out on the floor and lay the objects on top of this. When it comes to the technical aspects of the images, for my lighting I had the room in complete darkness and used a small torch to paint the objects. I had the camera on a tripod at a low angle leaning over the objects and set the shutter speed to 10 seconds in order to balance a good amount of light around the subjects. I wanted to have control of the lighting in this way so I could practice with light painting as I would like to explore this within my independent project. Black was a good colour background to work with in terms of long exposure light painting as helped blend the background with the darkness so only the subjects can be seen, really emphasising them and bringing them out of the environment.
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