After realising that the bouquet of roses I bought were rather cliche for the Objects of Desire assignment, I decided to use what I already had and try out an idea for another assignment: photographing the same flowers in the same position as they aged, and placing the new and old images side by side to show the ageing process and how time affects everyone and everything in the world, slowly decaying nature. This could be described as “enigmatic” because it is mysterious and interesting how time affects everything differently and at different rates; the lifespan for flowers, for example, is a lot shorter than the average human lifespan, and time affects flowers and nature at a much more rapid rate.

I chose the photo from the previous shoot that had the most impact on my peers to replicate for this experiment. Using my home studio with the same background roll and the same red velvet material from the previous shoot, I did my best to replicate the entire set-up as closely as possible and place the flowers in exactly the same way, photographing from similar angles. I opened the original image in Lightroom to view the metadata to set the shutter speed, ISO and aperture on my camera to the same settings as the last one, to get the closest possible exposure. It was hard to remember the positioning of the lighting the first time around, but I experimented with it until I got a similar result. Of course it was hard to get everything exactly identical, but I’m happy with my efforts. Due to the nature of trying to recreate one particular image, there isn’t as much noticeable variety between images as they needed to be shot from the same angle and same composition; the differences are more subtle such as tiny lighting and angle adjustments.

At this point, the flowers were around 10 days old and had opened up beautifully into large roses with soft petals. One particular yellow rose near the middle of the bouquet had begun to turn brown; this was when I decided I would allow the flowers to continue to grow for a bit longer, with the hope that more of the petals would turn brown as they aged and demonstrate the ageing process even clearer.

 

Further development (20/03/19) – I gave the flowers another week to continue the ageing process; although the petals didn’t turn as brown as I had hoped, the flowers were evidently past their best and were wilting and losing their shape and colour, meaning the element of time is still clear in the images. These images were again shot in the same environment with the same exposure, as closely to the previous two shoots as possible. I also took a few close-ups shots to see more clearly how the flowers had aged and changed. I think if I was to use these for my final submission, the comparison between the first and last image would have the greatest impact and show the largest time frame. Perhaps the middle shoot isn’t as relevant as it makes the ageing process look slower, more gradual and less effective, whereas the beginning and end give a bigger impact when comparing side by side as there is a more drastic change.