Thanks all, much appreciated. Nobody has accused me of photoplagiarism yet, that is good
One concern I had with this particular shot is the softness. In some other shots, I tried stopping down much more but then the joints between the shells became too prominent and the overall effect too two dimensional. So I settled on this fuzzy wuzzy version... maybe also to spite a certain friend of Edward's...
Yes and no. I did actually shoot it with the rb and a 90 or 127 onto old glass plates (which gave some of the soft tonality I wanted). You can certainly do that. That version wasn't half bad, in my opinion. But there are two things that'd be a bit hard to get without t&s unless you got the lens angle just right. (1) the out-of-focus business in the middle of the grouping was really essential to supporting the idea that it is a continuous piece; it keeps the continuity of the lines. Competing against and the requirement that the edges be mostly sharp is (2) I wanted the support entirely out of focus, i.e. I didn't want a DOF line running distractingly over the support. Hence tilt was the easy way to make it happen. On the other hand, I spent a long time (weeks) thinking about whether I really wanted the thing entirely in focus or a bit on the edge. In the end I went with a bit of fuzz because the lines just seemed more consistent that way. With everything in focus, it was just too immediately clear what the subject is and how I arranged it.
(One of the really special things about EW's composition, in my opinion, is that it's actually two shells arranged to appear as one continuous figure. In fact, I see it titled "shell" instead of "shells" ...and that is a bit of a clever trick, if it is what he wanted. It's not one shell, it's two balanced with care, and because he went for critical focus throughout, you can clearly see that it is two. So this little exercise that I set out for myself was really more about trying to discover what was going on in his thinking... that photograph of his is, in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of his still life work- it shows an appreciation of the "found" subject as it is but also in deep conflict with his own ideas about what it could/should be. Anyway :rolleyes: .... too much info?)
Notwithstanding that, sure, it definitely could have been shot with an rb or rz, and I did do that as well.
Incidentally there is one trick I used here, the figure is sitting atop a bottle cap. I needed a few extra mm of separation between the shells and support to get the DOF to work out. I do this quite often with macro subjects, to get a little bit more focus sep. As you can see, I am not one to stop down and put everything in equal focus.
Another reason why I went for the 5x7 contraption is because I am doing some others similar to this and the t&s is critical for some and not for others... but I want consistency among the shots. No idea when I'll get this nonsense out of my system, maybe two or three more, but I am assuming that there is an end to my compulsive pastaphilia