The idea for my chosen triptych came whilst collecting items for my original idea for the project which was based around the idea of addiction.
I was planning on using found and weathered items such as thrown away bottles, cigarette buds and chocolate wrappers as the subjects in my images.

Whilst foraging for these items I noticed a plastic bag floating in the water of the harbour. It instantly came to mind how it could be confused for being a jellyfish. With the vast and varied amount of marine life that exists, I felt like there was great room for creativity within the idea of making ordinary objects come across as being a creature from the ocean.

I did feel like it must have been taken note of before that plastic bags look surprising like jellyfish and so looked for inspiration from other photographers that had possibly noticed this correlation.

(Source: National Geographic)

I found a lot of images that focused around campaigning against the dumping of plastic bags in the ocean. These we’re taken professionally and used underwater equipment to their advantage, which I knew I would not be able to do since I didn’t have the experience or equipment to recreate. However, having not come across a series of images that focused on ordinary objects appearing as marine life, I decided to peruse it as my main project for the triptych.

I knew the background of the image would be a very important element for the piece so I spent a considerable amount of time looking for something that could convey the images as being underwater.
I eventually found a sheet of blue shiny wrapping paper in an arts and crafts store. At first I knew it was probably too small, but I realised I could get around this by using the Content-Aware fill feature in Photoshop to cover the gaps.
I also noticed that under certain angles, and due to the material, the lighting came across as rays of light underwater which I knew would work perfectly.

Before I even began taking photos, I looked up some professional product photographers. I knew that photographs of small objects are often taken with a simplistic background and no other surroundings. This is possibly due to the companies who make the products only wanting the size of the product to be assumed and/ or to place strong focus on the product alone. I knew that this type of photography would fit nicely with what I was going to have to be doing so chose to research it. One photographer that stood out to me was Minna Rossi.

As an example in the picture on the left. Her clear choice of weighting the composition of the image was something that I would like to be seen in my images. It provided me with a reference for how my own subjects could be laid out on the background. As the photo was shot straight above the product, it gave me an idea for how close I should also be to the subjects and an understanding for how the lighting could work. Except, Minna clearly had some form of professional lighting to aid her with her photographs, which I would not have, this meant that I would have to experiment to achieve similar styles with the lighting I had available.

I realised pretty early on that the images would have to be landscape instead of portrait. This is simply because of the subjects/ objects size as well as the fact that most marine life moves horizontally instead of vertically. If I chose to use portrait view for the images, there would have been large amounts of empty space above and below the objects. Although this could have possibly helped to convey underwater depth, I felt the adjustments to lighting would provide enough of an idea for viewers.

This is also the reason for the unusual layout of the triptych. I originally thought to have the images laid out side by side, going from the darkest image to the lightest. Due to the width of the images however, I felt that the triptych was bizarrely long and simply looks more appealing and confined in the layout I chose to use instead.

For the Jellyfish image, I chose to keep the background dark to make it appear to be deep underwater.
I chose to use a flash, much like all the other images in the triptych, this is because the light from my bedroom gave off a slightly yellow tint and was coming from a strange angle, casting massive shadows over the bottom of the piece.
I also digitally removed any strong shadows that were being cast from the flash onto the background. This is because it made it clear the bag was simply lying on a 2D surface, which I did not want. I did this as well for the 2 other images in the triptych as it was a recurring problem.
For this image, I chose to mask the plastic bag and edit it’s brightness so that it was much lighter than the background. This not only makes it stand out considerably, but also gives off the impression that the image was taken right next to the jellyfish (plastic bag), due to a strong close-range flash.
I chose to insert a second bag inside the main plastic bag. The original idea was to simply use it to add more tentacles to the jellyfish (plastic bag), however it also resolved several other problems. The first main fix being that the bag removed the high transparency of the larger plastic bag that was causing lighting issues for the image. The second was that the bag plumped up the larger bag, whereas before it came across as flat and unlifelike.

I used similar techniques as before on this image to give it a similar style and also because it had worked so well earlier.
The main difference for this one was that I found it really hard to convey depth in the image. The fact that the tie is practically 2 dimensional  when it is lying down make it very hard to make it come across as being an eel swimming.
So I chose to use photoshop’s blur feature. I wanted to make the image appear to be taken at night or dusk since I believe eels mainly hunt and operate at night time, I chose to use a very strong blur on the background as to remove the light ray effect the jellyfish image has. I wanted a relatively shallow depth of field on the eel itself by focusing on the front half of it’s body and gradually blurring out the tail, it appears the tail is far behind it giving it the false perception of depth I wanted to convey.

I simply used candle holder to create the fish, with their strong metallic shine and shape, I felt they would be easy to recognise as being small scaly fish. I also tore off pieces of plastic bags which I thought looked like bubbles. I tried cutting the plastic into perfect circles, however I wanted to keep the rough and pulled style the plastic had since I still wanted the viewer to recognise what it was.
The coral in the bottom right was a scarf combined with some thin wrapping paper that I felt would add to the image tremendously. Where as the other images have simply focused on one object each, I felt this one needed the extra hints to truly clarify what the candle holders were. As well as this, the coral scarf provides the metal fish with scale, showing that they are simply small coral inhabiting fish.

I chose to make the lighting brighter in this image. This is because most coral grows closer to the waters surface and by keeping the light high, there would appear to be more light rays coming down from above.
The downside to using the candle holders was that the metallic reflections combined with the raised brightness, having its effects on the background, the source of light is easily revealed as coming from the camera pointed directly at them,  instead of the intended downward effect I desired.