Today’s Call was “innocence.” It was one of those that took me a little while to figure out. My first thought was a photo of Stella, but she gets a lot of face time. My second thought was the color white.
It snowed all day, and I could have gotten a shot out in the white world. In fact, Sam suggested I do just that, but I was thinking about the many shades that white comes in, and decided to take a picture of various white objects. I thought a lot of textures would be good, but I couldn’t think of much beyond a white canvas and white paper. I decided to mull it over awhile and mix up some gluten-free flour so Luke could make one of his fabulous devil’s food cakes with velvet icing. As I was putting the various flours and starches away, I was struck with an idea: a plate full of said flours and starches and perhaps a few other ingredients.
I put piles of white rice flour, potato starch, sugar, salt, xylitol, cornstarch and confectioner’s sugar on my trusty, square, white plate. I then put a white canvas on the floor, placed the plate on that, stood a canvas behind the plate (as a reflector, more or less), and got out the camera. Here’s one of the shots:
Since I had the canvases set up and the macro lens on the camera, I decided to make the most of the situation and take pictures of the yellow roses my neighbor Jan got me the other day. Seeing the rose through the camera made me think of egg yolks, because the flower’s color is so yolk-y. Don’t you think?
I wondered, could I create an egg with a rose as the yolk? Well, the short answer is, “not this time around,” but I gave it a go, cutting the stem off one of the roses, placing it on that square white plate and surrounding it with corn syrup.
After deciding that was a bust, I picked up the rose to wash off the corn syrup, but wondered what it would look like if I dipped the front of the flower in the syrup. Answer: beautiful.
It didn’t take me long to start clicking through the camera’s picture modes. In fact, the image above was shot with the soft focus filter. Here are some of the other photos:
Monotone
Pop Art
Sepia
Dramatic Tone
At that point, I got out more items to photograph (once I get started, it’s hard to stop). The time eventually came to download my shots and prepare a photo for Call and Response. I opened one of the flour pictures in Photoshop, but was so taken with the the black and white flower pictures, I decided to use one of those. A quick tweaking of the levels (with the white eyedropper) and slight movements on the sliders gave me the perfect image to go with a favorite poem by Robert Frost. Please go look!
2 Comments
I love the way your mind works and the egg photo could be brilliant…you need to return to that one day! The corn syrup was such a stroke of genius, it looks just like dew drops.
I know, Jessica! Talk about a happy accident. I’ll be keeping the corn syrup in mind for future shots. I agree about the egg shot. I was using my 50mm lens, but a 35mm might work better. Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll play around a little more.