Illustration - Juxtaposition

My first experiment for this exercise was to photograph a person in a context illustrating their world.

Memories of the Mansion House

Nikon 18-200mm at 29mm: Iso 200 f5 for 1/4 second

This lady, now retired, worked for a number of years as housekeeper at the Mansion House in the City of London. The Lord Mayors of the City of London live at the Mansion House with their family for their year in office. Whilst working there, she collected considerable knowledge on the formal and personal life of the individuals who were Lord Mayors. She now has a collection of prints and books on the history of the City of London and its Lord Mayors. I have been helping her by putting together a series of photographs to accompany her presentation on Lord Mayors of Yesteryear.

In the entrance hall to her house, she has a collection of historic prints of the City of London. I took some photographs of her in front of these.

Observations

I decided that I had to convert this photograph to monochrome because of the mixed lighting in the scene. The foreground, including her face and the wall that she is standing by, is lit by tungsten or an energy saving lamp. The background area (wall and picture frames) is lit by daylight coming through the glass paneled front door. The background had a distinct blue colour cast relative to the foreground. Furthermore, the background was rather too bright.

I used PS Elements to convert to black and white, and as a starting point I tried the various preset options. I found that this was an effective way of reviewing a range of contrasting results,when we did the black and white conversion exercise earlier in this course. In this case, the"infra-red" setting was best: the red wall and her red jacket darkened so that her face, her light hair and the framed pictures on the wall stood out. Also the blue tinged wall in the background darkened noticeably so that the eye was not drawn to that area of the image more than necessary.

Book cover

I also gave some thought to using juxtaposition as an illustration for a book cover, as I felt that I had not used much creativity in the first photograph above. At first, I looked through our bookshelves for some potential titles. I chose a book that I read recently called "Heresy". The story was set in Elizabethan times, where an Italian ex monk gets involved in a series of murders linked with a secret group of catholics in Oxford. At the back of my mind, I had a recollection of a photograph that I took a couple of years ago in a church where the stems of the candles appeared red.

Shrine with candles

My thought was to use some of the visual elements from this scene, for example, a candle or candles against a dark background to represent religion, but to show a trail of red wax trailing down from the candle to look like blood dripping. I thought that this would make the link to the violent events in the story. However, I did not have the props readily to hand to create this photograph.

I ended up therefore seeing what props I had available to me around the house and then looked for a book title that I could illustrate with these. It struck me that my shaving brush might create an interesting juxtaposition with my wife's brush for applying make-up. On our bookshelf there was a book called "Yesterday morning" and I thought that shaving and putting on make-up are things that most people would associate with the early morning.

Cover idea for "Yesterday Morning"

Nikon 18-200mm at 70mm: Iso 200 f7.1 for 1/60th (with SB600 flash set on tripod)

Observations

Our bathroom has no natural light so I thought I would try using a flash that I was given recently to provide the lighting. I wanted the light to reveal the shapes and textures of these items. Linking the flash to the camera, I set the flash on a tripod to the right hand side of the frame, with the flash head angled upwards. (I tried various flash positions, but this was the one I preferred). I used the small diffuser on the flash head which reduced the intensity of the shadows on the wall, which otherwise were rather too strong. The walls of the bathroom reflected light back onto the items so that the photograph is quite high key, but the main colours are neutrals. There are quite a number of shiny objects or metallic pieces, as well as some small black and dark items. The contrasts are therefore quite strong.

These domestic items imply various ideas about the subject of the book:

- it is probably about ordinary lives or may start off that way;

- it suggests that the story is about a couple (male and female)

Strangely, with this picture of items from peoples daily routine, the title seems to gain a slightly uneasy feeling as if it is a thriller or possibly a tragic love story.

Looking inside the cover, however, the book is in fact the story of a young girl growing up in the early part of the 20th century, so my cover idea would be very misleading. The cover on the actual paperback edition is a girl on a swing viewed from below against a blue sky with white clouds. This nicely conveys a feeling of a child's carefree life when small.

Conclusions

I spent rather more time on this exercise than maybe envisaged by the course notes, but I thought it was worthwhile to attempt both types of subject. It was surprisingly difficult to devise photographs to illustrate book titles, in particular because of the practical constraints of finding the right props and a location.