Peer commissioned micro project

This project was an opportunity to find out if I could deliver an image requested quite specifically by one of my peers. I must admit to being a bit trepidatious when I first considered it, but as time went on it definitely got easier.

This is the brief that Philip gave me "The theme is "autumn flora". The twist is to produce an image of some autumnal flowers, but indoors in a still-life. And possibly shot in the style of the impressionists."

I don't usually do still life, much less work indoors, so I thought this was going to be quite a challenge for me. I thought long and hard about what "Autumn flora" might mean. Flowers that appear in autumn? Fungi? I finally decided to show flowers that had come to the end of their lives, their autumn, if you like.

I guessed a bunch of dead flowers wasn't going to show what was asked for, and would not show what I wanted it to. 

I realised quite quickly that there had to be something else in the image to point the viewer towards the theme of autumn. So I decided to stage the flowers (Roses in this case)with apples, autumn leaves and a conker. i figured this would give a sense of the season and possibly act as allegory for the autumn of the flowers.

The photograph itself was quite straightforward to make once I had worked out the composition. I decided to add a few jars of pickles and preserves to further show it was autumn, and took the photograph.

The next problem was how to make it look impressionistic? I knew from previous studies that the impressionists were not really enamoured with decay or death, preferring to celebrate life in the main , with just a few exceptions.

So I used a bit of artistic licence and decided to make the photograph look more like a late renaissance image, a time when the fascination for dead animals and rotten fruit was at its strongest. 

I darkened the image down a bit,gave it some more soft focus, added a partial vignette and gave it a bit of a dirty wash to make it look like a painting with the varnish going off a bit.

Philip was happy with the result, so I count this exercise as a success. 

Once again I have found that working outside my comfort zone has been really quite fulfilling. As I have said before I do not really see any new challenges in what I do usually, and i feel I am become stale within it. These new challenges are helping me to use my creative side in a way I would never have considered before. I like solving puzzles and solving problems, and this seems to be giving me an opportunity to do both. I know the finished image is quite amateur, but I am beginning to see how I could make my work look at least as if I might know what I am doing.

There were a number of abortive attemptsw, different lighting composition etc, and a few follow here.