Here is my best photo from my studio session yesterday:

I like the colour contrasts between the sweets and the blue background behind. Stacking sweets is a different way of viewing them and I feel this photo meets our new formalism brief well. I chose to use soft lighting in this photo with little shadow so that it looks more like a photo from the Toiletpaper magazine.

Here are a selection of the other photos I took:

I like the contrast between the two different card colours in this photo. The sweets do appear to be a little soft but I think it is just the lighting on the sugar which makes them appear to glow.

Apart from the angle that I took these photos at, which needs to be more from the surface instead of from a higher angle, I like how the objects in the shoes appear to be a replacement for legs. I may revisit taking these photos and play about with the angle I hold the camera at. The reason I took the photos from a high angle is because my shoe did not fit on the card if I took it from any lower angle. I have bought myself some bigger bits of card for next time so that I do not have this problem.

I am struggling to find much on ‘New Formalism’ photography – it seems to me like people are trying to keep it hidden on the internet. I found a Dutch magazine called Foam that seems to include quite a lot of it, but without ordering myself a copy, I have found it quite hard to access any of their photos. I am specifically looking for photos that deal with advertisement and the style of it but haven’t really found much.

I found this blog-post on New Formalism, however it simply loops back to ordering a subsciption to Foam, which I do not want:
http://conscientious.tumblr.com/post/88987019772/foam-38-under-construction-making-the-case

Having looked at the previous photo of walking boots, I realised I could base my photographs on shoes too. I like the photos in Toiletpaper that take the mickey of advertising so am perhaps thinking I could take 3 different photos of shoes that incorporate the idea of advertising and perhaps taking the mick of it.

I found this article on taking photos of shoes that is quite interesting:
http://www.pixelz.com/blog/dos-donts-footwear-product-photography/

I think I will stick to a background of one colour (a different colour on each photo) that either compliments or contrasts with the colour of the shoe.

After sifting through several websites of Still Life (I’m quite fussy), I came across this photo of a pair of walking boots called “After the walk”.

I really like the warm lighting in the photo, making it appear homely and make you want to go walking. The photo makes me think of winter walks and coming home into the warm after being out in a cold wind. I really like the positioning of the boots and brush etc in the photo as well as the vignette around the outside of it, which adds to the warmth of the photo. The photo was taken with a focal length of 55mm, which is probably what my photos will be taken at too. I may play about with the temperature in my own photos as I like the feeling that has been created here.

https://500px.com/photo/295192/after-the-walk-by-martin-zalba?from=user

Not the toilet kind!
After looking a a couple of photos from the magazine in our lesson, I decided to look through some of the photos published in the toilet paper magazine. I love how a lot of the work makes you think ‘what the hell’ and ‘who came up with this?!’ It has a weird, zany approach and actually makes you stop and think. Here are some of the photos that I specifically picked out:

I really like the consistency of the background colour behind the images. I also like the randomness of the subject in the photo. I might have a play-about in the studio with random objects and see if I can achieve anything similar.