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It's raining hard outside, I'm full of flu, so stuck for ideas I decided to have a go at a photograph in the style of Andreas Feinenger's still life's.

Gathering together my tripod, oven tray, play sand and some potpourri, I was all set...





Feininger Test v1 Taken With Fujifilm S5700, Macro, Aperture Priority, F3.5, 1.6 sec, ISO 100, Focal Length 11mm, Tripod



So when it's raining and I'm too ill to go out anyway, I often try something new, and after watching the Andreas Feininger video on my Photographers page, I was intrigued by his still-life technique, and wanted to have a go myself.

Here's my set-up:



The idea was to produce a still-life of an interesting object, on a natural support, with a natural back-ground.

I used an old baking tray, filled it with sand, then found a piece of potpourri as my subject. I found a cloudy sky picture on the Internet, then printed it out to use as my background. (It's a funny colour because my printer is running out of ink!) I used a BBQ cleaning brush to smooth the sand, and give it some texture, set my tripod up and fired off a few test shots.

In post (Photoshop Elements) i played around with the levels, stripped out the colour, and tried to introduce more of a selective focus look, but I'm not sure how successful that was.

I think for my next attempt I'll try to play around with the light, put a bit more texture into the sand, and play around with camera to subject and subject to background distance to alter the depth of field.

Cheers, Rob.