Advertising and still life.

Such favorite still lifes as "books with a stuffed owl", "grape and peach platter", etc. are totally out of date today. However, the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Photos in this field train the photographer's eye in discovering new colors and forms. Still life is available like no other subject in its power and tranquility (if only e.g. the table is not needed for dinner), ready to pose and practice the art of composition. Every photographer should get himself a small set of multi-colored ones, as well as one-color scarves.

For starters, curtains or other curtains will suffice. As we will explain in more detail about the composition of colors, the impact of an image depends to a large extent on interesting guiding lines and correctly placed focal points. Directions of all edges must be subordinated to this- as well as the arrangement of the foreground items. We miss the target, if we approach it too formally, based on Ostwald's circle and color harmony, as it is often recommended in various publications. This issue should be considered from a technical point of view, because the colors in the photo come out in completely different shades, than they were in the original.

In the field of advertising "still life", referred to here as "pictures of items", still retains its significance. According to the introduction, we will discuss this topic only from the point of view of timbre, in a few words. Tip, that you should work with little or no lighting effects at all, also applies here. In dark areas, colors will appear grey, and the bright lights will appear very faded again. Lighting is not a problem when shooting models in the atelier, which in this sense belong fully to advertising photos. Filtered spotlights can bring any photo to life, if only the type of theme allows it. For close-ups, a large depth of field is always desirable, which forces the use of very small aperture values; happily, that the exposure time does not play a major role here. It does, however, as we mentioned in the chapter "Lighting and exposure", to deviations from the measured exposure times and to a different color determination due to the Schwarzschild effect. Only experience can help. This is why you should keep a close record of the constantly changing results and still life shooting conditions. Small deviations can be corrected quite well by means of filters. However, if we start taking the next series of reversible photos, and this is mainly about them, we absolutely must use films with the same emulsion number.

The small size of this article is the opposite of the importance of color advertising photography. While color is becoming more and more important in all areas nowadays, it is in terms of advertising that it is necessary in the first row. Even if we are to propagate white pills, we can use colors. In such cases, more abstract forms should be used than before, which, thanks to their neat shapes and colors, attract the viewer's eye better.