‘The Erratics’ is a collection of work comprised of sculptures, photography as well as a book. The body of work is focused of rock formations and sculpted chalk with the subject of the photos alternating across pages between the found rocks (particularly the stones within the desert at the start of the book) where these monolithic structures are contrasted with the man mad chalk sculptures. The use of sliced chalks allows the contrast of the textured, natural surface of the stone as well as the smooth faces where it has been cut. This lets the subjects interact with the lighting in an interesting manner and creates variety for the 3D form of the object. The introduction of the smooth faces makes the 3D forms less distinguishable, bringing the photography more into abstraction. The book is shot in black and white which I find allows for better exploration of tone and contrast, this results in a series of impactful, minimalist images. The images are shot with alternating between studio and natural lighting; due to the lack of color I cannot tell what type of studio lighting was used however due to the soft drop shadows, diffusers were most probably used, likely in conjunction with reflectors in order to cast light on some of the hidden details of the subjects.

Pictured above is the cover photo for the book, A small aperture has been used in order to achieve a high level of detail across the images, this can be seen as the focus appears to be the same across the foreground and the subject of the image. It is hard to determine the length of shutter speed from the image since it is a studio shot without color, as such the color depth cant be used to infer the shutter speed. It is likely that the shutter speed is short however since it is a studio shot and the use of spot lamps can allow for a faster shutter. The cut across the chalk is intentionally lined up with the edge of the desk in order to create the illusion of the conjunction of 2 separate images into one. This makes it more difficult to distinguish particular forms bringing the image more into the lines of abstract.