This morning I was reading Szarkowski's 100 images book and was really absorbed in it. I ran across one of Paul Strand's images that I really liked and it stuck with me as I read through numerous other photographers work from the early 1930's. I decided that I needed a break from reading and as I was walking through our kitchen the strong side light coming onto our porch was overwhelming. My wife had put some small pumpkins on a bench my son built and the shadows, colors and lines reminded me of images I had seen of Edward Weston's. Weston did many still life images of vegetables and these really made me think of some of them. Of course this is in color and Weston's images were B&W. The colors in these images are fairly mute except for the strong orange in the middle. I would have loved to convert this to B&W but when I do it's much to grey and the tones are not what I would like even with the heavy contrast of light. I may try to mess around with it some more we'll see. I used the Leica M9 with the 50mm Summilux for both shots. I experimented with the f stops shooting one wide open at 1.4 and one at f8. Both have their good points. I like both equally but I lean towards the one shot wide open. It seems more interesting in some ways. These images are a strong departure for me and is something I don't normally do. As far as my art photography goes this is a step in the right direction.

Exposure ISO 160 1/3000s @ f1.4

I love the way the pumpkins nicely fall out of focus.

Exposure ISO 160 1/90s @ f8

The interesting thing is that after I shot the first one I went back in the house and looked at the images on the back of the camera and decided that maybe I need to do this again at f8. So back out I went and did it again at a tighter f stop. This image above is the one shot at f8.