“No Focus”

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optician while creating an impressive and enigmatic body of photographs. 

https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard
Meatyards images are usually deliberately unfocused. Therefore for my shoot I deliberately unfocused my camera to try to get the same effect as meatyard. In my images I experimented with ISO, focus control and depth of field.

Here are examples of Meatyard's work:

Here are unedited JPEG examples of my shoot:

Here are some of my favourite photos from the shoot that I have edited. I used adobe lightroom to manipulate these images. I applied a black and white preset to all of my images because Meatyards images were mainly in black and white. I then manipulated the exposure, contrast and cropped some images until I was satisfied with the outcome.

Although I like the outcome of the photos of the trees and the lake, I particularly like the photographs I took of the cat behind the fence. I like the depth of field created by the unfocused fence, which therefore focuses the audiences attention on the cat. I feel the black and white preset also aids in directing the attention on the cat because the bold and vibrant colours of the green grass and ivy could redirect and confuse the audiences attention.