Egg
For me "egg" relates immediately to the female egg cell, released every month during ovulation, then either fertilized by male sperm or shed with the corpus luteum during menstruation. Looking at the moment of ovulation, caught in an amazing photo I found on google, I realized it was yellow. What did I have at home that could represent it?
I ended up opening my fridge and finding the lemons and apples I've been hording, and knew I had to use them. Being immersed in the study of Renaissance art in the last few days I immediately thought I might as well do something in the same vein, still-life.
Looking for inspiration online my eyes were caught by a beautiful painting of one of the greatest ever, Caravaggio.
Still Life with Fruit (1605-1610)
Looking around the kitchen I found all I needed, including (very old) beans, lentils, sweet potatoes and more. My first thought was to use popcorn as the sperm on its way to the egg, the proportions seemed not too ridiculous. But the moment I saw my overgrown garlic, with its polliwog shape, all scientific accuracy went out the window.
I studied Caravaggio's use of colour, and saw he used warm and saturated reds and yellows on the left, the middle section however was mostly green and yellow, and juxtaposed to the basket in the bottom right corner was a splash of unsaturated red. For the photo it was going to be the opposite, I was going to switch it and have yellow in place of red and red in place of green. Why was that?
In my opinion the left part of the painting, the big basket and the dates, were the subject of the photo, or rather, the point that first draws the viewer’s attention. It's clearly painted in a color that attracts the eye, red, and it’s saturated and bright. I think the fact that the watermelon on the right is not as saturated is another proof of the fact the painter meant our eye to go to the left first.* For this reason the fertilized egg should be placed in the same position, thus making me switch the colours to keep the same balance. I think it's very interesting to note that although the fruits on the left are the most eye catching, the light beam is actually falling away from them on the watermelons and these worm-looking green fruits. These are actually the brightest parts of the picture. Yet any photographer would be able to tell you they tend to put their subjects in the brightest part of the frame, as another way to draw the viewer's eye. Why is that then? One explanation I was given is that the real subject of the painting is the wealth and richness of the edible fruits. Abundance is the subject, and this is why the painter doesn't allow your eye to focus on one point only.
My photo on the other hand would have a clearer subject, and this is why I decided that although I was going to replicate the light scheme of the painting, I was going to use an aperture which would allow for a medium depth of field, making a subtle but noticeable difference between the lemons and the rest. The sperm cells by the way didn’t just hung there obediently. I had to chew some gum to make it stick (:
Next thing we should touch upon is the beam of light. Two things that might not seem problematic on first glance made me sweat. First, as you can see, the beam is coming from the upper left part of the frame in direction of the bottom right corner. An interesting effect is going on there. The left side of the beam has a pretty soft transition from shadow to light- at least compared with the right side. But as could be expected, when I flashed my light, the left transition, where the wall was closer to the light was much sharper that the right transition. No matter what modification I used on my flash (different kinds of snoots in different angles) I couldn't get it. I also tried tilting surfaces in different angle in relation to the light (who said the wall behind Caravaggio's fruits was straight?) but I gave this up pretty quickly, it wasn't practical in this case since I didn’t have a good enough surface to put behind my vegetables instead of the wall. In the end the solution I found was to use a cutting board to make the right transition sharper.
A second problem remained. The beam in Caravaggio's painting is completely parallel. This is a weird physical effect, since light naturally spreads. I tried to look up the physical reasons for which light could fall in a parallel fashion, and found out about the collimated beam, in which light rays (or any other electromagnetic radiation), when travelling a very big distance become parallel. But this is not an effect we can witness naturally. It's true the light might be coming from the sun, but the actual source of light here would be the window, or the wall in the roof (legend has it that Caravaggio was thrown out of an apartment he was occupying for cutting a hole in the ceiling to get his signature light) and so it doesn't make sense the light would be parallel.
Well, the reason could simply be that we're dealing with a painting, and Caravaggio had every right to have a parallel light beam if he so desired. I, on the other hand, could not for the life of me get this effect without employing post production tools and so had to be content with my non-collimated beam.
To give the photo the painterly look it has I followed a workflow learned in a course about the theory of colour by Kate Woodman, a photographer I admire very much, in big part because of her knowledge and use of art history and theory in her work. Her workflow involves softening luminosity transitions and increasing the dynamic range of the image as well as split toning it and treating different colours individually, which helps tie together the colours in a cohesive way. On top of that I added some specific adjustment to make the photo more similar to Caravaggio's painting.
One thing I did very wrong in post was leaving to the end some healing and cloning of details, something that should be done early on in a healthy workflow. I was so excited to get into colour work that I jumped right to it and this made any later change way more complicated and time consuming than it could have been.
This photo was a good opportunity to learn about colour use and balance in a frame, as well as a reminder of the different tools we got as photographers to control where the eye goes. It was very interesting to review, via the reproduction of some elements in the painting, what the 17th century painter had done and the decisions he made.
* It's important to notice the handling of the painting and it's physical history might have had a role to play in the saturation of the different elements in it, but I didn't find a proof for that and thus have taken the colours as being a product of the painter's decisions.