This image won Best of Show in the 2015 UCM Photography EXPO! I shot this image for my Advanced Studio class, and I am really excited about this one! Our assignment was to shoot a still life, and I was inspired by the old dutch still life paintings (they always seem to have pears in them). With this I wanted to play off the idea of a pear resembling body shape, and how much emphasis our society puts on appearances and how it can affect our self image.
It’s a metaphor:
The green pear obviously represents the “perfect” clean body, and the measuring tape wrapped around it emphasizes our societies obsession with numbers and size. The pear is placed on a pedestal to symbolize the fact that this is what our society looks up to, and we place this above all else.
The brown pears are below the green pear, and appear to be bruised and beat up. They don’t appear to be perfect, and they are tipped over and tilted towards the green pear to symbolize that those who don’t fit society’s high standards look up to the perfect image as if that is what they wish to be, and they aren’t happy with themselves.
The dying flowers are placed in and around the pears to represent femininity and insecurity. Flowers are typically associated with women, and they are usually thought of as beautiful. However, here they are wilted and dying, representing the idea that negative body image and thoughts can lead someone to believe that they are no longer beautiful.
The process:
This set up only included one strobe, one fill card, and one LED flashlight. I placed one light to the left of the still life at a high angle with a snoot attached to it, to create a spotlight that I centered on the green pear. I placed a fill card to the front and right of the still life to just slightly fill in some of the shadows. This was shot at f/8 with a 10 second shutter speed. The flash fired at the start of the exposure, and then I used a small LED flashlight to paint in light so I could highlight what I wanted, and to create extra texture, dimension, and separation. Using both a strobe and a flashlight created some difference in color temperature. I could have fixed this by placing a colored filter over the flashlight, but I decided that the different color temperatures helped emphasize my concept, so I kept it as it was.
