‘Found object’, my connotations of a found object is an object that is either; unwanted, old or weathered. So for this project I want to flip these connotations around and manipulate my found object so that my final images connotes life and colour. So to start my I research off, I want to look at the techniques that still life photographers that experiment with colour use, to see if I can uses this as inspiration towards my final outcome.
Research
Stephanie Gonot
Gonot is a still life photographer based in Los Angeles, I find her work very striking and visually appetising, from the way that she uses and experiments with bright, bold colours within her work.
Gonot uses a high key lighting setup for her pieces which I feel helps the emphasise the bold colours that she uses in her work. This will be something I plan to explore in my own still life work as I feel that the use of bold, bright backdrop colours and a high key lighting set-up will help to give life to my found objects. Studying Gonot’s has also provided me with inspiration to what my found object / objects, her work in souley based around edible objects or objects the are made to look edible. This has given me the idea to search for items like drink bottles / cans or food packaging, but because these objects have to be found they maybe used or empty, therefore I want to give these items a new sense of life using colour, bold backdrops and lighting to create a new sense of energy on the forgotten items.
Juliette Mainx
Mainx is a fashion photographer from Berlin and her work is quite diverse, were as although she works a fashion photographer, Mainx also photograph’s still life scenes that share a lot of common features to Gonot’s work. Both use high key lighting set-ups and bold colourful backdrops for their still life scene’s also Mainx uses objects that could be seen or our edible objects.
You can see here three of her images that are placed in a tryptic format, because the images I create have to be in this same format its useful to see how an tryptic; what colours go well with each other. I like Mainx’s style as she also uses appropriation in her work, although I did this in the previous brief so will not be considering it an idea for this brief.
Contact Sheets
Through-out these first Images I experimented with my lighting ( where I positioned my single light in order to reduce the shadows created upon the backdrop of my image) and I also experimented with the camera settings ( shutter speed and aperture ). 
I positioned my single lighting directly on to the bottle, in line with the direction I was pointing the camera, this reduced the shadows in my images and left them hidden by the bottle rather than apparent in my images, if I was to do this shoot again I would add another light which would balance the lighting out much better as well as reducing the shadows better.
I refined the camera settings at this point to a shutter speed of 1/80th of a second and an aperture of 5.6. Having the shutter speed at 1/80 of a second allowed me to achieve a clear, crisp image without the chance of motion blur in my images. My aperture I set at 5.6 so that I could achieve a short focal length, I did this with the intention to have to focus of the camera and to slightly blur the backdrop as this isn’t the main focus of my images and the detail isn’t needed. I struggled with reducing the reflection of the light upon the glass, this is hard to avoid because of the glass surface of the bottle, so if I was to do this shoot again I’d put more consideration into the subject of my work.
