Aamir Zakaria Photography

Still Life

I’m work­ing on still life images, among oth­er things, to expand my pho­to­graph­ic reper­toire. When a teacher sug­gest­ed this to me, my first thought was “why?”.  I nev­er under­stood why painters used still lifes as sub­jects.  I asked local artist Jay Mer­ca­do, who explained how he tries to evoke erot­ic feel­ings out of the curves in some of the still life works he does.  It gave me an inter­est­ing take on what can be done with basic forms.

I want to start a series of apples play­ing with dif­fer­ent light­ing.  The more seri­ous I get about pho­tog­ra­phy, the more I real­ize how much there is to learn.  As a land­scape and cityscape pho­tog­ra­ph­er, I uti­lize the light around me.  Although I have to time things right to get the light­ing I want, I’m not actu­al­ly con­trol­ling the light source itself.  With a still life, I can decide if I want nat­ur­al light, arti­fi­cial light, com­bi­na­tions of both, and how I want to adjust the angle of the light(s).  I can also adjust the back­ground to my suit­ing, where­as in out­door pho­tog­ra­phy, the only way to adjust the back­ground is to move around and recompose.

Anoth­er skill I think will be use­ful for still life pho­tog­ra­phy is draw­ing.  I just picked up the book Draw­ing on the Right Side of The Brain by Bet­ty Edwards and look for­ward to doing some sketch­ing.  I’m too embar­rassed to show you the end result of my first attempt to draw an apple, but the very act of sketch­ing, putting pen­cil to paper, brought out a flur­ry of ideas which I was then able to jot down right then and there on my sketch pad, includ­ing dia­grams of light­ing posi­tions.  It was an eye-open­ing exer­cise in what can be gained by return­ing to the phys­i­cal act of writ­ing on paper, instead of using the dig­i­tal media that I’ve come accus­tomed to.