Stacking Blocks

You know it seems to me that upon looking further at these still life shots all over deviant art and on the net, that I should most certainly be taking a step back. I mean still life captures stillness, and I creep in so close because when I started doing photography I lived in its face. Macro is my safe place. Soooo today is another failure to quite capture what it is that still life is, but I do say that I still like these anyway.

Stacks seem to me a very common thing in still life. A stack of books, a stack of dishes, and even stacks of of pens and pencils. So today I tried picking out a few of my old school novels. Moby Dick is the big one. And then randomly stacking them on my side table. Upon this I discovered that books do NOT like flash. Ever try taking a picture of a book while its open? Not pretty I can assure you. You blind yourself and anyone else in the room, on top of that you can't read anything that was on the page. It reminds me of a white out in Antarctica.

By the way, while taking these photos I had to move the things off my side table and realized... I have perfect still life stuff. A random fake flower bouquet, an old looking bowl with some change in it, and little trinkets that look like leaves. So that will be my attempt throughout tomorrow. To manage to take a far away shot of these things on the table... or a table. You know I haven't quite decided where, but I'll figure it out.

Also I realized old things make for a very fine subject matter. Grainy things like wood for instance. Make a very fine texture shot. We'll see if I can't manage to stack some of the long books too for another shot in my spare time. Not for this of course unless it turns out great because we all know what a mood I get into when I photograph the same subject matter days in a row. Soooo here we go. Which reminds me, the photo below... its not some special diary of secrets, it might not look it there, but its just my plant journal, heh. I'm starting this one out to record how my sunflowers grow this year. So its not as secretive as it looks, haha.

So try it yourselves, its rather fun. Making the simple ordinary things look suspicious.