Surf’s Up!

As I have finally arrived in San Diego for Day 1 of a month-long trip, I figured it would be pretty easy to choose my item for the still product assignment: a surfboard.

After going through the majority of a bottle of Aloe Vera, it was time to cool down and capture some shots of this piece of sports equipment. Immediately, I overlooked the situation and found that it is not so easy to capture different lighting and angles of a rather large and uniquely shaped object.

Thinking about the history and surfing setting in general, I immediately wanted to try out various backgrounds such as the beach, palm trees, ocean and different types of greenery. I felt like using these backgrounds would give the surfboard a more authentic feel and ultimately be more enticing to purchase than if I had placed it on the floor or ground. In addition to this, given that surfing is an outdoor sport, the inside wouldn’t do it justice. The object would look out of place.

After watching the photo composition basics video lecture time and time again, I decided to experiment with a few different angles, including flipping the phone upside down and capturing images from the ground, a tip I learned from the vodcast with Lehigh University’s own Christa Neu. I found this worked great as I was able to capture the entire boards while also capturing palm trees in the background.

I also tried to play around the aesthetic in my third photo of the Instagram carousel by including similar colored objects like a cooler and frisbee. To me, this is very complementing and appealing to the eye.

A third basic strategy that I experimented with was through layering. In my first photo of the Instagram carousel, I used the back and side of my friend’s head to alter the perspective of the photo. I attempted to give the view from how an individual would look at the surfboards, thus blurring out the objects.

With the importance of natural light and setting in mind, I struggled to change the shadows and lighting of the object. I think this may have been because the object is mainly white, and the natural weather was extremely cloudy. Having my brother around to hold the makeshift-reflector was helpful, but I didn’t feel as if it changed the coloring of the surfboard a whole lot.