Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Photography Assignment #5: Still Life

Teachers Instructions:
"A still life is generally an interior scene of inanimate objects, often of a manipulated or constructed set of elements. Find a “non-action” situation that appeals to you visually. Make a photograph of this. Think about the composition of the image, and the edges of the frame. What information do you want to include and to exclude from the frame, and why."

Coffin of King Tutankhamun

This photograph is the Coffin of King Tutankhamun at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. The museum has strict rules of no flash photography and you can not use a tripod. What I wanted to accomplish while photographing the Coffin of King Tutankhamun was to have him centered on a completely blacked out background. The reason for the blacked out background is because I did not want any of the exhibits, lighting or people that step into the background of the picture to be a distraction from the subject I was photographing. For the most part I accomplished what I pictured in my head before photographing the coffin but had to make a few minor adjustments in Nikon's Capture NX Software. There was two spots in the background showing through but the rest was black so I adjusted the lighting in those areas to complete the black background I was looking for.

I photographed the picture with my Nikon D70s with no Flash. I shot the photograph in Manual Mode and in RAW format. The exposure was shot at 0.077 sec (1/13). The aperture was f/4.5 and the focal length was 46 mm.