Intro To Digital Photography – Abstraction Unit Blog Post #9

There are many photographers and photographs that I would like to take inspiration from for my triptych.

One of the main ones is Jackie Ranken’s Other Realities series – I like how otherworldly and almost ghostly the images seem, and I also really like the sentiment behind the photos, which is “the finding of beauty in everyday objects.”

Some key characteristics of these images are the fact that they are all black-and-white/monochromatic, there is often a lot of bright empty space, the subject is usually in the center of the image, the images are usually rather low-contrast, and there is a slight vignette effect around the edges of the photographs.

Another inspiration would be the works of the photographer Ola Kolehmainen:

This is a particular one of his photos that I like – Kolehmainen’s photos often include vibrant colors, which is definitely something that I want to try and include in my own photographs, but what caught my attention about this photo in particular is the reflection of the tree in the glass. To me, this image appears as if it could be from a random building on a random street, when the photographer walked by and decided to capture the moment, and I think that’s a really nice sentiment. Some common characteristics of these photos are the vibrant use of color (often ranging from a variety of warm and cool tones), as well as the focus on shapes and lines formed by the objects in the photos – often in geometric shapes.

Another photographer whose works I’m inspired by is Frances Seward:

Some key characteristics of Seward’s photos that I am inspired by is the way the colors and shapes flow together to create these images that look like scenes that might exist in real life, but are so unreal and so not grounded in reality that they could also be anything else. Seward’s images often have a rather pleasing color palette, with a lot of analogous, complementary and split complementary colors, and the colors are very vibrant as well.

I chose these photographers to reference for my own photos, because of all of these characteristics that are present in their work. I want to combine the otherworldly feeling of Jackie Ranken and Frances Seward’s photos with the interesting colors from Ola Kolehmainen, and I want to capture the way these photographers all find beauty in simple, ordinary things – Jackie Ranken’s “finding beauty in everyday objects”, Ola Kolehmainen’s architecture, and Frances Seward’s glass.

Out of all the photos above, I find this one particularly interesting. I am drawn to its bright colors and the nice contrast between the vibrant orange and the calmer blues and greens near the bottom of the image, and how it uses the shapes and forms of the objects to create overlapping rectangular shapes, and the darker sections also creates clear divides between the spaces of bright colors. One of the formal elements that are the most integral to this image would, in my opinion, be shape. The dark shapes break up the image and creates divides between the warm and cool tones, and the colors themselves also form some interesting geometric shapes as well – for example, the series of repeated arch-like pointy shapes, or the series of overlapping rectangular shapes that is quite reminiscent of a bunch of highlighter strokes. This repetition of elements combined with the interesting shapes really makes a unique image and plays a large role in making this picture more abstract.