I chose to study Rita due to the sense of identity in her portraits of still life items. While there is no human subject in the photo, it is still structured like a traditional portrait allowing the photos to tell a story behind the object while leaving an air of ambiguity around the photos.

As far as technical aspects of the images go, they are structured like a typical portrait with soft lighting to avoid harsh shadows and a typically larger aperture to allow for a narrow depth of field while still allowing for a wide DoF in wider shots. She also appears to use a slower shutter speed due to the strong contrast and colors in the photos. The subjects in most of her photos are centralized in the image creating a fell of importance to the subjects. It looks as though her images could made using film due to the slight grain and Gaussian blur. The lower images seems to be exhibiting bokeh as well also suggesting that this is taken on film.

Images Sampled from Rita’s Book ‘Where Mimosa Bloom’

I like the idea of taking a portrait of a statue as it allows for exploration of traditional portraiture techniques while still sticking with the idea of still life portraiture and I believe that the broken statue can tell a much more powerful story than a traditional portrait.

Zhao Xiaomeng took many photographs of abandoned bikes scattered across the streets of Beijing. I personally like how much about someones personality you can tell from the scattered bikes, they all have various adjustments and additions made to make the previous owners life just a little bit easier. I like the compositions of the images as I like how somewhat abstract still life photography is being framed as though it is a traditional portrait, with rather blank backgrounds to allow the subject to strongly contrast it. Most of the subjects have some strong color either from the weathered paint or the rust patina. It looks as though he has used a small aperture due to the wide depth of field, as a consequence of this I believe that the photos were taken using a long shutter speed and low ISO due to the amount of detail captured in the photos. The photos are rather de-saturated but still show color depth.