Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in 1925 in Illinois. He studied pre-dentistry but later changed his studies into become an optician. He bought his first camera in 1950 to photograph his first new born child. In 1954 he joined the Lexington camera club.

Though Meatyard experimented with lots of different ways to take images such as using multiple exposures and blur. He often worked with very heavy depth of field effects in his images and normally worked in black and white. He may have worked with heavy depth of field effects to reflect his job as an optician. These can be seen especially well in his “Zen Twigs” project.

This is a selection of my favourite work by Meatyard. These are all images from his “Zen Twigs” project. In this project he focused mostly on depth of field to make the images look simple.

After researching about Meatyard, I went out and took some images like the ones from his “Zen Twig” project. After I went out and took some photographs I went into photoshop and edited the best ones. I have done this to crop them down to the parts I wanted, to make them black and white so they’re more similar to Meatyards project and to change the exposure levels to make some of the images a lot darker than the others. I have changed the exposure to make them darker so that the blacks in the images stand out a lot more over the whites. These are the best images I took on this photoshoot:

The image shown above is my favourite image that I took. In this image specifically I have added a lot of exposure to make the dark areas stand out a lot over the white. I think this image mimics Meatyard’s work the best out of the images I took as it shows a very heavy amount of depth of field around the focus point. While the image below don’t show nearly as much.

The images above and below show branches in focus in the foreground with a lot of depth of field in the background. These images follows closely with Meatyard’s work due to the main focus point and the huge amount of depth of field in the background. If I were to take the above image again I’d focus further in on one part of the branch rather than the whole thing. While the below image I am happy with how it turned out.