STILL LIFE PHOTOGRAPHY IS as old as photography itself.

In the early days, when light sensitive materials where slow, necessitating very long exposures, still life was an ideal subject matter, for it does not move at all, which allowed the photographer to open the lens for as long as was needed to make a lasting impression on the silver halide.

In those days, photographers were also wrecked with self-doubt, forever debating about whether what they did was art, or mere craft. Those who wanted to prove the artistry of their hobby often emulated master painters of the past, creating portraits in the styles of renaissance masters and still lifes those made on canvass by dutch painters.

That is not to say that still life photography is an old and decaying art... anything but!

From fine-art to culinary and floral photography, the still life is as alive and vibrant as it has ever been. In fact, for the professional photographer, still life studio photography, in the guise of product and advertising photography, has become on of the most lucrative and challenging fields of our craft.

And rightly so, too, for in photography as an art form there is no purer sense of control as that offered by the measured deliberateness in still life. Absolutely every element in the frame is at the mercy of the creative will of the photographer. From the placing of individual items, making up the composition, to the point of view of the camera, and most importantly the lighting, it's qualities, including color, intensity, direction, everything, a function of the mind of the photographer.

This does of course mean that to reach the highest echelons of studio still life, you will need an unrivaled grasp of every aspect of photography. For when everything is under your control, you need to be in control of everything.

Still lifes at home

Until very recently there were only two options available to the amateur still life photographer: either shoot in black and white, or layout on tremendously expensive lighting equipment.

The reason for this is that each type of light has a specific color quality, called its color temperature. Some lights are slightly 'cold' and have a yellow tint, such as tungsten light bulbs, the little round ones most of us have in our homes. Others may be slightly green, or slightly blue, and correcting for this when shooting on 35mm negative was very tricky, involving using either special film, which had to be balanced to the exact temperature of your light, or filters, which would 'correct' the color of the light, or both.

The obvious alternative was to use a light source that emits the same color light as the sun, i.e. daylight balance light. This is, of course, what was used in most professional studios, and it works tremendously well.

The only problem is that it very expensive.

So most hobbyists stayed well clear of still life photography.

Today, all this has changed. With the advent of digital photography, we can adjust the color balance of our camera's digital sensor, allowing us to use a much wider range of light sources and still get satisfactory results. In fact, we can even adjust the color temperature after shooting, during post-processing, provided we shoot in RAW, as opposed to JPEG or Tiff mode.