itchen items can make for interesting abstract close-up subjects. And, a small wooden chopping block in the kitchen can quickly become a miniature studio. Positioned near a south-facing window, there’s plenty of available light to practice “kitchen art.”
Obviously the idea of kitchen art isn’t limited to the cheese grater you see in the images here, as any metallic surface will perform equally well when shot close-up. Consider spoons, forks, knives, measuring cups, bowls, pots, pans, kettles, skillets, corkscrews, garlic presses, whisks, and eggbeaters, to name just a few. Kitchens aren’t just for cooking food, but in fact provide any number of recipes for photographic fine art.
With my camera and lens mounted on tripod, I was soon filling my frame with a very simple graphic composition of three salad forks placed on bright orange wrapping paper. With my focal length set to 180mm, I chose an aperture near wide open (f/5.6) to render shallow depth of field. The resulting selective focus emphasized the forks without revealing the details in the colorful wrapping paper.
Micro-Nikkor 70–180mm lens at 180mm, f/5.6 for 1/90 sec.
Kitchen art in this case was a cheese grater transformed into a colorful abstract composition. It’s a simple idea that, in addition to the grater, requires only the use of one or two pieces of colorful gift wrap. The reflective surface of the highly polished metal picks up the colors of the two different pieces of gift wrap. I used a wide-open aperture here to render no depth of field, and selective focus is the result: Softer, less-defined reflections contrast with the sharper grater holes.
In contrast to the first image in this group, the interpretation above of the cheese grater was made at f/16. This much smaller aperture opening rendered massive sharpness throughout the image.
Middle image: Nikkor 105mm macro lens, ISO 200, f/2.8 for 1/250 sec.; bottom image: Nikkor 105mm macro lens, ISO 200, f/16 for 1/8 sec.
