Digital Photography Part 2 (Final Assignment)

逊卿自治药房
The Art of Self Care, 2019

This year marks the 48th work anniversary of my mother at the Singapore Thong Chai Medical Institution. At age 19 in the 1980s, she’s served as a clerk long enough to witnessed the relocation of Former Thong Chai Medical Building from Eu Tong Sen Street to where it is today, at Chin Swee Road.

Growing up at my mother’s office, I cruised through the pharmacies, libraries and even gotten my first acupuncture at the age of 8 (after a broken ankle). Getting fed bitter, Chinese traditional medical pills instead of flavoured antibiotics as a child got me a little peeved, only to find myself leaning towards the bottle of anti-heaty pills instead of paracetamol when I feel a fever growing at age 24.

Inspired by familiarity and my mother’s penchant for self medication, I composed my series of 10 body of images reflecting upon these traditional Chinese medicinal products lying around at home.

In the first assignment, I managed to experiment with a layout, featuring local flowers and fun pack stickers for the first variant.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kl5NC0WKQuDruUKFASK-D2afYhvpgMAw1txzPJDesTI/edit?usp=sharing

In order to do this, I’ve prepared a workflow to shoot, and determine which flowers to match, below are some revised layouts and borders, the square boxes are to align the cropping of the product shots.

Some snippets of the actual product shoot.

Camera Settings – f/5.6, ISO 200, focal length 41.0
Camera – Sony A6000, 16-50mm lens

In all honesty, I enjoyed this layout, but I was mostly concerned about the fact that almost 40% of the image is being covered in this composition. As this is a photographic based assignment, I decided to explore other sets of borders. But hey, this gets a feature on my OSS page.

Each product is then matched to its individual exotic flowers (drawn By Olga Korneeva, I previously purchased her set of illustrations for another project).

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Post Production:

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Before & After Images: