Past It's Best

Past It's Best:
Following my theme of decay, I have migrated into the realm of mouldy food. I will use a macro lens to take in-depth photographs of food and the different stages of decay that occur after the food has become inedible. 

Image Bank:











Photographer's Research:

Joe Buglewicz:

He is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Journalism. Buglewicz has contributed to magazines and newspapers and has even reached a national scale of publication. However, he took the time to document the slowly moulding contents of his fridge as a comment on the global phenomenon of food wastage. His aim was to bring how much food we waste to people's attention in the hopes of raising awareness and eventually reducing it. 









Contact Sheets:

Images that need Improvement:
DS7_4643.JPG:
I was using a torch to light my images and experimented with different types of lighting I could create with it by holding it at different angles but also diffusing it off of a piece of card. This image is one of my least favourite outcomes from the different lighting as it is too harsh and obscures the mould I was trying to capture. I rectified this in the later images by diffusing the torch's light off of a white piece of card. 

DS7_4652.JPG:
The plate in this image is too far away as I was trying to focus on the mould and you cannot see it clearly from that distance. There is also a large amount of negative space which I feel leaves the photograph feeling empty and uninteresting. If I were to reshoot these images I would get closer to the subject matter in order to fill the screen. 

DS7_4663.JPG:
As I have previously said I was using a torch to light my images and using a white piece of card to soften the light. For this image, I was holding the torch and card above the camera to give a more direct light which would illuminate the front of the subject. This however created a large shadow as the light was directly above the plate, consequently, the large shadow is in the shot. 

My Best Images:

I wanted to take all of the images in a uniform format so that the viewer would be forced to look at the mouldy food, which we would throw out at arm's length and not give it a second thought. However, in doing so I made the images shallow and devoid of any real emotional involvement - like an example photograph in a textbook. My main idea was to document mouldy food and I achieved this, but the images are too plain and they don't make the reader consider their eating choices. My plan wasn't to disgust the viewer but to inspire them to be more socially responsible in terms of wasting food. 

Despite this, I think my best image from this shoot is the last one as it is mimicking a well-balanced meal which in reality is revolting and would make anyone who ate it seriously ill. I have learnt some interesting lighting techniques from this shoot despite some of the images from my experiments turning out different from what I had imagined. 

I wouldn't say that I have failed in this shoot as it has shown me that I need to focus on my lighting and composition as these two elements can make or break an image. Next time I will consider how I will light my images and how much of the image I want to be negative space. 

AO2: Explore and select appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops. 

For this shoot, I used a Nikon D7200 with a 105mm Macro lens, tripod and remote release. For the lighting, I used a bright torch and a piece of card to diffuse the light which created a soft glow instead of a harsh beam of illumination. I did experiment with the different ways I could use the torch but and I found the direct beam was too bright and as a result, some of the details in the image were lost.

My camera settings were F/22, exposure: 13" and ISO of 640. Generally, photographers keep the ISO low to avoid noise in their images. I, however, wanted to create subtle noise in my images so they would look like the filters I used on my first shoot except it would be on the images themselves. I also used a high F-stop to capture all of the details and keep the viewer's attention on the plate. In retrospect, I should have lowered my F-stop to create tunnel vision on the mouldy fruit which would have left the viewer nowhere else to look. As it is, I didn't use a low f-stop and so there is a large amount of negative space in the image which distracts from the subject. Next time I will use a lower F-stop but also physically get closer to the image so that there is less negative space in my shots. 

AO1: Develop ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding. 

My main influence for this shoot was Joe Buglewicz, a photojournalist who, as a personal project ,took photographs of anything that went mouldy in his fridge. I did the same within a much shorter time frame as I wanted to try and think about my own food wastage and how it could have a larger impact on the environment. 

I found that my family wastes a large amount of food due to the amount we buy outweighing the amount we ate. This may sound like a very basic answer but the simplest one is correct. To reduce my families waste we need to look and plan different meals that can use similar ingredients such as jacket potatoes and putting the remainder into a casserole. If we followed this idea then my household would waste less food, however it is easy to become bored of eating similar meal, it won't always be possible to use everything. Despite this if we all made a conscious effort to create less food waste we wouldn't lose as much money and there would be more to go around.  

To edit my images I used Photoshop. As I was shooting in JPEGs I cannot alter the images until I have opened them (this is different with RAW files). 

I began by straightening the images as all of my best images were slightly tilted due to the camera's position on the tripod. 

I then used curves to change the colours so that they looked more tinged and mouldy.

Finally I lowered the brightness and the raised the contrast so that the vegetables looked almost radioactive. 

Here are my best images:

AO4:Present a personal and meaningful response that realises intentions and, where appropriate, makes connections between visual and other elements. 

I believe that I have achieved what I set out to do: document mouldy vegetables. However, my images lack personality as I have focused on documenting the vegetables instead of framing them which has lead to all of images looking similar.

For my next shoot I will allow more vegetables to rot and then I will take more Macro photographs and focus on the lighting and the composition. 

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Shoot Two - Past It's Best
I kept the same vegetables and allowed them to rot down further to show the full extent of their decomposition that we as a society would much rather throw away than to acknowledge.  

Contact Sheet:

Images that need improvement:

DS7_4820.JPG:
This image is one of the first in this shoot and so I was still trying to establish the appropriate camera settings. I was once again using a torch to light my images, however this time I didn't use a white piece of card to diffuse the light. This resulted in harsh lighting and so most of the details in the first image are lost due to the lack of exposure. The camera angle is also tilted as I was using a tripod and Macro lens which meant I had to change the distance from the camera to the subject if I wanted to enlarge the image. During moving the camera I could have jogged it or I may have set it up like that; I corrected this camera angle for the other shots into the series as they aren't skewed. 

DS7_4841.JPG:
I changed the composition from the other images and so I needed to readjust the camera's focus as I was using manual settings. To rectify this I switched the auto-focus on so that the focusing would be in the correct depth and then back to manual so that I could make small adjustments to catch the finer details, I also had to do this for DS7_4844.JPG.

Best Images:
My subject for this shoot was rotten food and so some may argue that there are no good images in this shoot. 

A03: Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions, reflecting critically on work and progress.

For this shoot my main idea was to record what we as a society wouldn't normally see. We bundle our waste into parcels that are then taken away from our houses and disposed of; we never have to see the end result of this process and these images are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the decomposition of organic matter. I wanted to investigate what happens to our waste once we decide it is inedible and throw it away. 

For this shoot the subject was and still is disgusting (probably even more disgusting but I will not be documenting this further). This means that my images cannot be aesthetically pleasing in any way shape or form as the subject itself is hideous. This means that the only aspect of my images that will be pleasing is the technique that I have used to take these images. 

AO2: Explore and select appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops.

  

I used the same setup for this shoot that I used for my last shoot. This included a Nikon D7200, Macro lens, tripod, remote release and a torch. Due to the weight of the camera on the tripod there is a small amount of camera slip because of the lens and so I had to counter act this with my positioning of the camera and composition.