Assignment 5 – Photography is simple

Brief – Take a series of 10 photographs of any subject exploring the theme ‘Photography is Simple’. Each photograph should be a unique view, it should contain new information.

Planning / Research

When initially looking at this assignment, I found it the hardest of all the assignments I have been given to date. I feel that the open brief almost gives us too much room to play around with ideas as it doesn’t narrow down to one specific subject. To be honest I didn’t know where to start because of the millions of potential ideas for this assignment. I do think this assignment is more focus on the creative side, actually exploring photography more than the technical side and getting the perfect composition.

Fay Godwin

One person I feel does this really well and someone I have looked at in a previous assignment is Fay Godwin. A British photographer who was famous for her black and white landscapes of the British countryside and coast.

Fay even rejects the term ‘landscape photographer’, insisting that she is a documentary photographer – someone who reports on the landscape. She began photographing many famous literary figures in Britain at the time. However after her husband died suddenly in 1976 and around the same time she herself was diagnosed with cancer, the direction of her work began to change. She concentrated more on the landscape, and all natural things became incredibly important. Godwin’s work was changing in other ways as she looked for new challenges. After being awarded a Fellowship of the Nation Museum of Photography in 1986, she spent a year working on a series of colour industrial landscapes, and this was later followed by a series of colour abstract images focusing on shape, texture and form.

“I’m a documentary photographer, my work is about reality, but that shouldn’t mean I can’t be creative”

When someone once remarked to her that she had been lucky to catch the ideal cloud formations in a particular picture she quickly replied,

“I didn’t catch it. I sat down and waited three days for it”

Because I was so unsure where to take this assignment in the beginning, I began by creating a mind map to get all my ideas out on paper to see them more clearly and narrow them down to a single idea. I have added this mind map below.

For my take on this assignment I decided to shoot flowers. I think I was originally overthinking the point of this task and making it more complicated than it needed to be. However I looked back at the brief and at my mind map of ideas and the simplest idea may actually be the best way to do it. I think the point of this task is to for once not focus so much on composition of a photograph and to take creative shots that show that behind all the technicalities – photography is simple.

Whilst flowers are a simple subject, they are something I am quite familiar with. We always have flowers in the house and growing in the garden, so there’s always so much colour around us which is a perfect opportunity to photograph.

This first image was something I really couldn’t miss photographing. Recently it was the 1 year anniversary of my Nan passing, so we had a few bunches of flowers around the house. So whilst they may just be petals and stems, this gave them a much more significant value.

Something I discovered whilst photographing flowers was that whilst they can be so beautiful and come in so many different shapes and sizes, they don’t last very long so we have to make the most of them while we have them. I definitely interpreted this as a metaphor for life, which I related back to the brief – the images should contain new information.

I also wanted to look at the less ‘pretty’ side of flowers – when they eventually die. This is a common occurrence in our house as we often have flowers left on the fireplace and in the kitchen until the petals start to turn brown and fall off. The shot above shows two bunches we had in the kitchen but one day I came downstairs and the petals had fallen all over the counter, I couldn’t miss photographing this.

I also wanted to include a close up of the dying flowers we had in the kitchen. All of these shots had a really high ISO (shown under each image) as I really wanted to capture the true beauty of the flowers and make the colours as vibrant as possible.

Another bunch of lilies ended up in our living room and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to get a shot of them. The vibrant pink added a pop of colour to the house so I used a high ISO to capture this.

It was hard to decide on a final image as I had taken so different shot over the past couple of weeks but this shot of some peony’s I got for my Mum was my final choice. I used the close up option on my camera and used the settings shown above.

I then went outside and shot some of the flowers in the garden, we had such nice weather today so it was the perfect opportunity. The close ups had a shallow depth of field to focus more on the foreground.

I got both wide angle shots and close ups of the flowers and chose my favourites. These shots used a lower ISO as the natural light outside was already really good.

One point in the brief that we were supposed to follow was that the shots should contain new information, and I can definitely say I have learnt. I had never been someone to look twice at flowers, or buy them for myself to dot around the house, however having to look closely and in depth at different kinds and colours really showed me how beautiful they are. It’s such a simple subject that is often overlooked by a lot of people and not appreciated, but while photographing every bouquet that came within my sight, it did indeed show that photography is simple.