"Traditional Still Life Photography"
by Charles Batchelder-CT
Monday, November 27, 7:30 PM


This presentation uses the established artistic principles and characteristics that have defined “Still Life” as an art form since before the 17th century and marries them to present-day photographic technique. We will define traditional still life photography and then show the difference between it and other styles of still life photography. The compositional considerations of traditional still life photography will be presented with examples from the presenter's portfolio. Finally, a practical workflow is laid out that enables any photographer to get good traditional still life results with typical photographic equipment and software. Included in this workflow is a detailed explanation of focus stacking and its use to achieve the results that are seen in traditional still life work from the 17th century.

Our Speaker has spent much of his life in the artistic world studying music theory and composition. Spending much time in the fine arts center of the University as a music student, he also enjoyed being close to various other kinds of artists and their work and was especially attracted to the photography exhibits that would often come to the University galleries.

After college, he embarked on a career of building and maintaining pipe organs and rebuilding and maintaining pianos. In the 1970s, he bought an affordable fixed lens range finder camera by Canon that was called the ‘Canonet’. Though he was not a big fan of the camera, because of the Canonet, he built a darkroom in his basement and spent many hours developing and printing 35mm black and white film and found he enjoyed this new artistic endeavor.

After a stint in the computer world as a computer programmer and systems analyst he returned to his artistic roots earning a Master’s degree in music education and then spent the next 16 years teaching music in elementary schools in western Connecticut.

In 2002, Charles returned to photography as a hobby, which he had abandoned for a couple of decades, purchasing a tiny Nikon COOLPIX 3100 3 megapixel digital camera. He spent the next many months photographing everything in sight and discovering the new world of digital post-processing, which reminded him of his pleasurable previous darkroom experiences. As the years passed, he graduated to bigger, better cameras and bigger, better software. Upon his retirement, as he became increasingly obsessed with photography, he decided to seek out others similarly afflicted and joined the Flagpole Photographers Camera Club in Newtown, CT. Here he was inspired by the work of exceptional fellow photographers and found an environment that enabled him to make good progress as a photographer and to eventually find a niche of unexpected expertise as a still life photographer