Black and White Photography
Wilko van Oostrum

Aesthetics of Transience

Translated from Deutsch
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In this evocative composition, the quiet beauty of transience unfolds. Dried rosebuds, a striking poppy capsule, and rough, weathered seed pods come together against a coarsely textured fabric background to form a poignant still life. The masterful interplay of deep shades and extremely tactile surface textures is perfectly captured by the subtle gray-scale rendering and the classic grain of Fomapan 9x12 sheet film. A contemplative work full of textured depth and melancholy, precisely staged with the Sinar view camera.

Posted in Black and White Photography
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Luther Haag6d ago

The choice to shoot film for this really matters. You're working with something that can hold the grain structure of both the fabric and those dried forms at the same scale, and sheet film gives you the tonal range to separate the capsule from the seed pods without them blending into visual noise. The staging is deliberate but not precious. These aren't arranged to look like they fell that way, they're composed, and that's what makes the melancholy readable instead of just pretty decay.

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Wilko van Oostrum5d ago
Translated from Deutsch

Hello Luther, many, many thanks for your comment. You got it. And that's why I shoot at Planfim so I can work out such details.

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Nora Beckett6d ago

The grain structure on Fomapan does something really specific to botanical textures that I don't see with other films. The way the poppy capsule's ridges hold light against that coarse fabric, there's almost a graphite quality to it. I work mostly in dry media and this makes me want to set up something similar with actual charcoal, see if I can get that same weight in the darks without losing the surface detail you've preserved here.

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Wilko van Oostrum5d ago
Translated from Deutsch

Hello Luther, thank you very much for your comment. That's why I'm shooting at Planfim in order to be able to work out such details. But with charcoal the atmosphere could also work. I am very curious about the result. Will you show us that then?

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