Ralph Eugene Meatyard  was born May 15, 1925. He was an american photographer who initially in the navy during world war 2, after the world war he began to study to become on optician. After he married he continued his trade as an optician with a company that also sold photography equipment. Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 and joined the ‘Lexington Camera Club’. He tended to make work in bursts and left his film for long times before developing it in his darkroom at his home. He approaches photography with a heavily influenced jazz music background, he used his children as the prime subject in his photos. He addressed the ‘masks of identity’ and the nature of the surface matter. By the time he dies his work was just being recognized.

This photo by Ralph Eugene Meatyard has a main focus which is the twigs, this then gives the photo depth, because of the blurred background it shoes the distance in the photo and it isn’t just a shallow photo where everything is focused in the image. Meatyard has used a natural light because of the nature of his photo, this gives the photo a mysterious feel to it because of the shadows in the background created by trees behind it, even tho is is blurred out it is  still apart of the photo and gives it that mysterious feel.

I aimed to take photos like Ralph Eugene Meatyard, with little focus in the pictures. Here are a few of my outcomes;

This small selection of photos show the way I try to copy the way Ralph took his photos. I used manual focus to get these photos and zoom, this is so I could really focus on one thing in the photo. I got inspiration for these photos by his selection of photos known as ‘Zen Twigs’.  The depth in these images vary, this is because depending on the background of the photo, how blurred out it was, some of the images had a slightly blurred out background whereas others had one main focus in the photo.