Portraits of things

Sometimes – or rather, quite often – I take photographs of what I refer to as \’found objects\’. Which means that normally I don\’t alter or even touch them, all I do is to find the right angle and/or light to take a photo of such objects. It\’s a bit like taking a portrait of a thing, and this can be environmental or with gently blending out the background, whatever you like. It\’s a bit like performing finger exercises on a musical instrument, and in my opinion it also trains your view quite a bit – you can actually learn from this.

I just took a photo of a small bottle of yoghurt drink with using my studio strobe and a beauty dish. But you don\’t have to use any fancy lighting, a small battery-powered compact flash bounced off a wall or a reflector would give you pretty much the same result:

Fitness drink

I used my Olympus E-PL5 \”Pen\”-type camera with a Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens set to an aperture of f/3.2 – for which I had to turn down that studio strobe to 1/32nd of its maximum power output.

If you do this for a while, you can actually do it blindfolded – and that gives you the opportunity to care only about the light, the composition etcetera – so when you actually have a breathing object, you\’ll have enough confidence to do just the same. It\’s caring for the one you photograph instead of thinking about technique and gear.

Thanks for viewing.