For this photoshoot I wanted to re-visit the idea of formally photographing plants and objects I find at Green Island, taking inspiration from Chrystel Lebas and Edward Salisbury and his botanical photography.  I wanted to create a scientific style to contrast with the landscape photography that would be in my photobook.

I first chose the image i thought were the most aesthetically pleasing and has the best lighting in them. I then displayed below unedited. I want to show the contest between the unedited to the edited. in this shoot gathered the objects i collected recently and tried to put them in different arrangements to find the one that with the best composition and patterns. I tried photographing single objects and finally started combining different objects together to create a contrast in the images.

I chose this as one of my final images to eventually start to experiment with because of the arrangement of plants. I tried many different ways of displaying these and found i they look best when i arranged them in size order. I think this makes the image look more scientific, similar to how a botanist would look at plants to analyse them. I think having them in size order shows how they were all at different points of growing, representing how the environment is constantly changing and evolving.

I also like this image due to the repetition of the stems creating vertical lines. Each plant then has different shapes and directions which their leaves are going, making all of the plants part of repetition but all being different.

The way the plants are displayed reflect botanists work. For example, in this photoshoot i took inspiration from Anna Atkins (16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871) who  was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph.

Anna Atkins learned directly from the scientist William Talbot about two of his inventions related to photography: the “photogenic drawing” technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitized paper which is exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotype. Atkins self-published her photograms in the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843.

“Looking at Atkins’s book today, what is most striking is not the outlines of the algae, however beautifully and delicately they crawl across the pages” (Joanna Moorhead, The Guardian)

I think the images i look interpret Atkin’s, but when i develop the images further and edit them i will make them look even similar to resemble photograms on light sensitive paper.

I also chose the two images below as my final images for this photoshoot as i think they also interpret the work of Anna Atkins well, especially when she looked plants in her photograms, as the stems and leaves are similar to my photographs. I also tried to arrange the plants in a similar way, vertical and spread out so you can see all parts of the plants, reflecting the work of botanists.

I like these two images as they work as single images and as a series. I think they work well displayed together as they are both simplistic images,and the contrast between the one plant and two is small, but changes the composition. The first image shows the plant displayed centered with equal space around the sides, this is so the whole plant is in the frame. I purposefully took the images so that shadows  were created underneath the plants so that there are a range of different tones from light to dark in the image. I also wanted to see what the shadows would look like when i edited them with the appearance of a photogram as botanists don’t display there plants with shadows as it’s printed on light sensitive paper.

I used the white background against the plants so that the detailed sections of the plant can be seen and emphasised when i edit them. I chose these plants to photograph as i like how the parts of the plants had dried and gone a brown tone as it created sharp edges to the ends. Also the flowers on the ends had dried as well creating an interesting circle pattern to contrasts with the rest of the image with sharp lines. I also displayed the image with two plants in it as i thought it had an interesting composition where the plants weren’t centered like in my other images.

Conclusion

Overall, i think i successfully took my images in the style of early botanists but i still want to develop these images more by experimenting with different edits and colours. I will then display these together to show different variations of the same image.