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Shoot still life fine art indoors

Techniques

24 October 2007 14:31

It’s always easy to find inspiration when you’re out shooting stunning light, a dramatic event or a beautiful landscape. It’s far more difficult when you’re stuck indoors on a dark, wet winter’s day.

For this indoor project you need to look for objects with interesting shapes, textures and forms. Even the bric-a-brac hidden in the darkest corners of your home, shed or garage can make great images.

At first glance this rusty spring doesn’t seem to offer much potential. Follow our tips and you’ll end up with a much more interesting image.

• You don’t need a sophisticated studio set-up. A simple desk lamp will be fine. We found a frosted glass dish in our local supermarket to use as a backdrop, but you could use an opaque sheet of glass or plastic instead. The dish was placed so we could light it from beneath, giving the simple, clean background we were after. Using a piece of white card as a backdrop behind the dish ensured there were no distracting elements in frame.

• All the subjects we found were pretty small – the spring used in the main image was just one inch long – so we needed to use a macro lens to get in close enough to fill the frame. You could use screw-in close-up lenses as a more affordable option, or choose bigger subjects instead, although the bigger the subject the more difficult it is to get the minimal depth-of-field.

• To throw most of the object out of focus beyond depth-of-field we set a very wide aperture of f/2.8, the widest setting available on the Sigma 50mm macro lens we used. Shooting from just above the subject and careful manual focusing achieved the rest.