Following suit with last week’s theme, I decided to share more of my work that emphasized experimenting with light albeit taken in a slightly different direction. Unlike last time these photos are the product of fairly controlled circumstances rather than trying to make the best of the situation in front of me. Originally for an assignment in my Color Photography class that was meant to emphasize color, these pictures are mainly the result of shining a flashlight through different colored glass bottles and then documenting the outcome; with the slight exception of the third, which was taken using natural light and with a glass guitar slide pressed up to the lens, generating a tunnel-like effect. After some initial frustration with the assignment upon being unsure of what direction it should go, I decided to experiment with making still-lives from a few of the empty glass bottles in my dorm. At the outset I was primarily using a desk lamp as a direct light source to cast hard shadows and generate silhouettes of the bottles, and despite my moderate satisfaction with the results, I was more enamored by the way the light passing through the bottles was behaving.
Immediately I found that this was what I wanted my project to center around, this new direction offered a more textured showcase of color while also maintaining some of the qualities of the earlier attempts. In the future, I would like to revisit this concept but with the addition of more colored light, possibly from separate sources; I think that would add a wider dynamic overall. In the case of the third, slightly different image, I had found that by shooting through the guitar slide I had access to an entirely new way of controlling light in frame. In a few photos that aren’t included I even managed to cause large full frame circles of light to appear along the perimeter of the slide itself. In shooting that picture specifically I saw the way a film canister on my desk was interacting with its shadow and promptly assembled a still life using the same bottles from the other photographs. Despite the somewhat cliche nature of a photo student taking a picture of something like a film canister, I feel as if I was able to learn a lot about manipulating light when shooting these photos.
