14. Still Life


I went to some college fest yesterday to shoot. I saw this security person and found the lights quite interesting ( I was shooting in B&W ).

After some shots I noticed the peculiar expressions on his face. The expression of boredom, monotonous life. The cry for some excitement in life.

And that gave me the subject of today’s post.

Aim: To capture the emotions of boredom, dullness in a security guard daily routine

I started with finding the right vantage point to shoot.

I finalized two of them with a specific purpose for each.

1. Shot from front showing the expressions on the face.

2. Shot from behind showing the body language.

I started with the 1st idea of capturing emotions on his face.

After some time I started noticing very small details like:  the shadow of the guard on table, the red colored small M on his tie, the edges of the table. I tried to include the shadow and some changes to include table more dynamically.

The result was not that great so I took a break analyzing again the activity around him. I noticed that he was almost fixed to his spot while people were going in and out.

And then I thought of capturing what can be said as the literal translation of still life. The security guard frozen to his spot while showing the blurred motion of people in the background. But it was difficult managing shooting at low shutter speed without tripod and  the guard was also moving. So I talked to him and requested him to be still for some time.

Then I went to try the second idea of showing his body language by shooting from behind.

After analyzing all results I selected the photograph showing the movement of people. I did some changes in Lightroom and here is the final result

P.S. : please give your feedback as it will help me in improving my photography skills

  1. Hey very nice website!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your site and take the feeds also…I am happy to find numerous useful info here in the post, we need work out more techniques in this regard, thanks for sharing. . . . . .

    • ashish verma
    • January 20th, 2012

    very nice work…n nice website… picture really speaks louder than words… even i am inspired to make a website of my own.. 🙂

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