In this post I would like to show that you don’t need sophisticated lighting setups and other “special” props to create interesting still life images. All I used in the photos that you will see below was a glass, an apple, two small sheets of black paper, and two cardboard frames.

The main player here was the light. For quite some time now I’ve been noticing that I have a beautiful light coming from my kitchen window during the late afternoon hours, and finally I decided to take advantage of it. Writing these lines it is a late afternoon of another day, this same light again coming from my kitchen window and I struggle with a strong urge to leave everything and shoot some more still life.

I liked how the glass shadow looks on the black sheet of paper. To enhance it I poured water inside the glass to make it wet, so the shadow would look more interesting, and here is the result.

In post processing I converted the photo to B&W (when you shoot RAW you always get a colored image), and increased contrast and clarity. That’s it.

Click on the photo to enlarge.

In the next photo I deliberately used a green apple, because I intended for the shots to be in b&w except for the apple, and being evenly colored green it was very easy to leave only the green color. In lightroom rather then directly converting the photo to B&W, I separately decreased the saturation of all colors except the green. Then I had to increase the green saturation to bring back the original color of the apple. In this photos I simply put one black sheet of paper on the kitchen table, and another one was acting as a background. The rest is obvious. The direction of the light can be easily determined from the highlight on the apple. Because I couldn’t move the light source 🙂 I created my composition so that the light would be falling in the desired direction. In post processing, in addition to what I already described, I also increased clarity and contrast, and added just a touch of vignetting.

Click on the photo to enlarge.

In the next three photos I was playing with geometric forms, light and shadow. I poured some water into the glass to get additional horizontal line for my geometric formation. Actually I did that intuitively, and only now, realized why. Here again, two most important factors were light and creativity. You should understand that I didn’t come up with these compositions right away. It took me quite some time of thinking, imagining, trial, and error to come up with something that I thought was working for me.

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Here I tried to shoot just a fragment of the whole, and ended up liking it. In my opinion it gives a hint of the whole leaving enough room for imagination.

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In this final photo I tried a more complex approach to my composition by adding more detail. I think it is a risky thing to do because I could easily over complicate the photo thus loosing the viewer’s attention. I hope I didn’t, and I’d be glad to hear about it in the comments to this post.

Click on the photo to enlarge.

So here you go. Still life photography that doesn’t require expensive equipment or artificial light. I hope you liked it, and I hope that you got inspired by it to create your own still life images.

As always your comments are appreciated, and

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Wishing everybody a Fruitful and Creative New Year!

Greg.