Still Life on Lockdown

I've been setting up a wee studio upstairs and playing around with various bits and bobs.  I'm not really into Still Life but I have to admit it's been a lot of fun - trying to tell a story.  I cobbled together some stuff and attempted to make a coherent picture from it.  I suspect it's one of those times when you need to look objectively at the scene you've created and take one item away.  Anyway, here's a few first attempts for your delectation.

In this first one we have the subject writing home to his sweetheart from his travels in some foreign clime:

From the 'Blad, on Barclay graded paper

The briefcase belonged to my late Uncle - that's his address book too. The photograph is of my mum in her younger days and the camera is a very nice Zorki 6 complete with leather case that someone kindly sent me a while back.  The bottle of Quink actually has my name on it - from my first year at secondary school.  It's hard to think we still used proper pens and ink back then (1974).  It has lain in a box up in my mum's house for the past 45 years and had dried up a bit - but a little hot water brought it back to life.  I guess that's the sort of things mothers keep, for some reason ;)  Anyway, I'm glad she did.  I found the stamps, by the way, inside one of the pockets of the briefcase - one has Queen Elizabeth on it, the other has her father, King George, so I guess my Uncle used this case from the '30s or '40s.  The scene was lit from side by just a desk lamp with a warm bulb.  I think I put a piece of muslin over it to soften it a little.  Can you spot the rookie mistake?  There's a little bit of blu-tac showing under the pen...

Then I got thinking what other period photographs do we have and after a bit of digging around I shifted the story to a military one:

Writing home to the family

In this one the family shot is one of me (standing at the back, sleeves rolled up, ready for action), brother and mother.  The dog tags belonged to my wife's grandfather and date back to WWI.  The group of soldiers include my grandfather's brother's son, who joined the US Army when he turned 18. Everything else is the same (including the blasted blu-tac).

So that was my first foray into the world of Still Life.  I'm not quite done with this scene yet - there are other shots lying inside various cameras as we speak and at some stage they will come out and onto paper.  After that I've various other ideas to keep me off the streets - I'm fortunate in that my mother never moved house, so things got set aside into various drawers and sheds and never thrown out.  Not that she's a hoarder - she doesn't buy stuff to keep, but she doesn't throw much out.  Probably it's a wartime/rationing thing - 'stuff' was scarce back then so you kept, mended and made do.  Suddenly, after 50 odd years, some of the stuff she's kept takes on a rather interesting dimension.  So I could get into this Still Life melarky, I think.