Individual Project- Initial Ideas 1- Smoke, Flowers and Fragility

I decided to work in photography over video to begin with as I felt that this would be the fastest and easiest way to capture my ideas, without the need for an entire crew, as would be required for video work. I looked back at some images i had taken over the summer and started to form a project around these.

Two ideas formed from looking at these images. One strain formed around the photographs of smoke and flowers I had taken previously. (The second idea is listed in the following post.) I felt that, though these images were fairly diverse in their subject matter it would be best to group them together as they seemed to fall under the same heading of "fragility". The idea that something very fragile could be captured onto film, or as in the case of my smoke images, saved as a digital file and made far more tangible was the concept behind this idea. Two of my photographs of smoke are shown here below.

I decided to discard the idea of photographing smoke, as I had only managed to capture it with a digital slr, and focus on the flowers, which I had photographed with a Holga, using a polaroid back and fuji fp-100c silk film. This is a slightly out-dated mode of polaroid film, which is a peel-apart film, creating a positive image and a negative, which is usually thrown away. The reason that the polaroid idea seemed more important to me was that it created a physical object, an image which could be held in your hands and was completely unique, in a matter of minutes, from a very fragile object, the flower.

I photographed the flowers at night for several reasons, firstly, when the sun is out, the flower is in full bloom, they seem very robust, bright, physical objects. Once the sun goes down the flower starts to close up, to shut down and become something very delicate and insubstantial. The second reason for photographing them at night was it meant I could better control the light to give this impression in the image. To create the image below I placed a large piece of matt black paper behind the flowers, set the Holga to the B setting and wedged the shutter down with a piece of paper. I then took an old hotshoe flash and fired it off once on either side of the flowers, this gave the subject an almost ethereal glow and lifted them off the background. (The photographs of smoke were shot in a very similar way except using a DSLR and a single firing of the flash.)