Two weeks ago, I conducted a small photo-shoot around my house and have produced three creative responses to Duane Michaels which all have varying themes.
This first set consists of shots of my home street with power lines in view to convey the literal connection between the images—power lines connect from post to post to transmit bulk electricity from substations across the grid. I hadn't realised that these photos would all work so well together 'til I had looked at them altogether in the folder that these photos were stored in.
As I scrolled through them, thinking of what to do with them, I noticed this pattern. There were two other images that would have fit the bill, although they would have stuck out like sore thumbs and would break this rule of six images I am applying for this creative response. That, and there weren't many fascinating or unique qualities about the images themselves to begin with.
This second set consists of photos—despite the first—of the branches of my willow tree in my front garden, all taken from different angles. I chose to take these images in ways in which it could almost be pieced together like a puzzle, but not quite. The complexity of a willow tree is hard to put together in bits and pieces, and its beauty comes from its complex and chaotic nature.
I also chose to take a different compositional approach to this series by having parts of the tree dangling before the lens and others acting as an outline to the image, namely in the second, fifth and sixth images—reading left to right from top to bottom. If I were to arrange them to form an image close to what it could actually look like, I would remove the first photo, put the fourth at the top in the centre, then have the second below and to the left, then the third image next to that, before having the sixth image beneath the second and finally the fifth image below the third.
Finally, I have a shoot containing animals. The first two and the fourth are of my kitten Rudy, sitting at a few months over a year old, the fifth is of my eldest cat Patches, sitting around eight years old, and the sixth is of my dog Priscilla, around the same age as Patches. As I usually muck about with my photo-shoots, I decided to snap quick photos of them and go about my business back to my shooting, although I found that these images work quite well together, so I decided to make them their own series.
The third image is a grim and disturbing photo, it being of the carcase of a mouse my kitten Rudy had presumably killed. I rediscovered the carcase recently and it has since lost all solid form. I decided that it would make for a good image in this series to convey that whilst these animals are domesticated and friendly, they still have hunting abilities and are still capable of murder.
