Picture Project- Treasure

Due on Flikr by midnight on 14th December ready for group tutorial

The latest theme we were given was treasure, i was very excited about this as straight away i had a lot of ideas.

The obvious thing that comes to mind would be something like Gold, or jewellery, like pirates treasure, but i didnt want to do something obvious.

I thought about treasuring a moment or a person, and thought maybe a mother holding their child, treasuring the moment with them, this lead me to think about treasuring a moment in time and preserving a moment in time, i remembered the old photographs that my dad has and the war medals, that have been passed down to him, this to me is family treasure.

The beautifully preserved medals and original boxes that they were posted in and still with the postal stamps intact on the letters to loved ones.

I wanted to convey some kind of rhetoric here and also create a feeling of nostalgia when looking at the photograph.

Firstly i tried out a few macro shots as i was in the studio doing my other Macro work so thought i would experiment with this firstly.

I like this shot as it clearly shows the stamps and the date stamp also which is quite important. I dont think this shows enough though to be used for the final image, i want it to be more personal and tell a story.

I had the items on a product table in the studio and used two Bowen flash heads, one on either side of the table, i used the diffuse umbrella with both lights (the white part of the umbrella after taking off the black and sliver outer part), the lights were pointing up at the ceiling. I used this lighting setup as i wanted an even wash of light, i had learned when photographing my glass bottle that this setup was not only good for giving an even light and useful for glass- such as perfume bottles, but also because the light is being diffused through the white material and being bounced off the ceiling, it creates a very even light.

I placed the items together on the table, tags, medal, badge, the original box that the medal was sent to the soldiers home address in and the letter home and envelope. The letter began.. My own darling, i have been thinking how rotten it was leaving you. When i first read it, it brought a tear to my eye, a letter from my great grandfather to his beloved, whom he was seperated from by war.

As you can see this is on the white product table, which doesnt really suit the items here. It would be adequate for a documentary photograph but doesnt create the atmosphere that i want.

The black background is much better but i felt this still wasnt quite personal enough. I found a card saying in loving  memory of... and decided to use this in the photo to add to the story and also found an old photograph of my great grandfather and great grandmother.

This is the final image that i used: