Manual Camera Work: Ralph Eugene Meatyard (in progress)

In order to further explore and improve on the manual camera skills I have learnt in the past week, I have decided to take inspiration from photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and his projects “No Focus” and “Zen Twigs”, in which Meatyard explores the use of manual focus, and produces work to show both unfocused images that have a show a lack of context, as well as images that focus on nature with a shallow depth of field, that both help to draw the attention of the viewer, with effective use of contrasting, grey-scale colors.

The following images were taken by Meatyard during his “No Focus” project, and are the images that I took inspiration from:

Both of Meatyards projects hold some similarities as well as differences. “No Focus” is a project that focused on removing the context of the image, and presenting images as more flat and without depth, while still presenting enough contrast and shape to draw the attention of the viewer, allowing them to question the context, as the can’t see it.

In similarity, “Zen Twigs” focuses on the naturally twisted and unpredictable shapes of branches and twigs, while throwing the background completely out of focus. This draws the attention to the subject matter (the twigs), while separating the subject from it’s naturally surrounding, therefore creating a very abstract and out-of-context effect.

As a response to Meatyards work, I produced the following photo shoot, focusing mainly on the use of depth of field and manual focus:

The above photoshoot I took inspiration specifically from Meatyard’s “No Focus” project. In order to present images as having high contrast, I purposefully chose images that were naturally black or white, and placed them together to create contrast. I also used a variety of wires, boxes and stationary as subjects to show different shapes, which will help with drawing the attention of the viewer to the different shapes.

After taking the photo-shoot, I edited my images to enhance the colour contrast. I edited the images so that the colours became grayscale, which is a tactic used by Meatyard in his images to emphasise the shape and contrast of his images.