Still life images are not something I do a lot of. So over the winter I endeavored to learn a bit more about some techniques for photographing such scenes.

The first few images I created were photographed in my tabletop light box against a black background and using a single light from the side. The result was some classic-looking images.

The technique I used in the images below was to photograph the subject against a neutral gray background. In the image below, I show how I photographed this scene against the gray background. In addition, I focus stacked the image. As I’ve explained in previous posts, I shoot a series of images moving the focal point of each image successively through scene. The resulting images are stacked together with the sharpest bits of each image being combined into a final photo that is tack sharp throughout.

The reason for shooting the scene against a gray background is that it makes it very easy to replace the background in Photoshop with anything I choose. In this particular case, to create the background, I started with 3 photos of various textures which I blended together in Photoshop. The result was the image below.

Over several days, I photographed flowers and tools in my workshop. After creating a series of images, I combined some of them into triptychs and grids.

All-in-all it was fun and perhaps something I will do a little more of in the future.

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