About the Image(s)

”Memory” is yet another piece of my creative photography course homework, a still life with the theme ”Spring”. The vase of tulips well past their prime had stood on my kitchen table for weeks, drying into more and more interesting shapes. Against the faded blue tablecloth they looked like a memory of springs gone by, and I decided to try to create a dreamy high-key image with muted colors for that effect. - We had been introduced the Pep Ventosa impressionist technique of blending multiple slightly different views of the target in a variety of blend modes and opacities. I hung the tablecloth on a piece of cardboard propped on the table for a background, and got soft cloudy-sky daylight from the window on the right. I set the camera on tripod, focused manually on the flowers and took 15 images, turning the vase round a full circle. Fuji X-T4, 27.5 mm, f/11, 1/7 s, ISO 160. I loaded the images in Affinity Photo and started to layer them on the base image, aligning the base of the vase as closely as I could, and adjusted levels and brightness. I used eight of the exposures, in 12-60% opacities, using Soft Light, Lighter Color, and Luminosity blend modes, and erased the ghost outlines from the fallen petals and the base of the vase. I finished it in NIK Color Efex, with a touch of color contrast and a slightly cooler color temperature.- Any suggestions for improvements? - What do you think about the background: are the patterns on the cloth distracting or do they add a romantic note?