My very firs project was to shoot a low key image of a hat, we had to use continuous lighting to create a low key, black and white image of a model wearing a hat. This was a good introduction to studio photography as I had never done it before. We experimented with light, learning about its qualities of diffusion, direction and intensity. Only one continuous, incandescent light was allowed for this shoot, this tested out hands on ability to modify and move the lights, helping me to understand the studio space and how to use it best.
High Key
My second image was a high key image, to look back on this it seems easy, but I remember the stress as I was given four studio flashes and a light meter, then more or less allowed to experiment. I took my inspiration from Richard Avedon's images of miners, they show normal people in a setting generally reserved for celebrity. High key portraiture is normally used in fashion or celebrity photography so i liked to idea of juxtaposing this with the rough and ready look of this painter. It was key to my advancement as a professional photographer that I leaned these techniques, as in-between the extremes of high key and low key photography lies every photograph ever taken.
Scale
The next project we were given was based around digital manipulation and required us to shoot two images then digitally composite them together, playing with the surrealism of scale whilst staying within the scope of advertising imagery. The concept within this image is strong, based around the idea of being "lost in the words" the image was created to be used as a dyslexia awareness advert. However as I had not been at collage long my time management was not as good as it is today and I spent far to much time making the words rather than taking the photos! If I had used my time more wisely I could have experimented with different compositions, hopefully finding one that better worked for my idea.
Food
One of the best projects I did in first year was the food project, we needed to shoot a meal and accompanying lifestyle shot. Our images had to be shot in the style of a particular cookery book picked from a list and needed to adhere closely to the styling within your chosen book. This was the first project where my work took a jump towards being much more professional and I am still very happy to have both on my website.
Little Black Dress
Working as part of an efficient and coherent design team is one of the best ways to produce high level images. For this project we were given designers to work with who had been making the quintessential evening wear that is the little black dress. Working as part of a team like this was much more demanding as it meant I needed to take up roll as project leader, guiding the styling and timescales of the soot to make sure it ran as smoothly as possible.
Hitchcock
Another project based around team work, we were working as a group of up to eight members. Our aim was to recreate a still from the Alfred Hitchcock film "Vertigo." we had to work closely with designers and graphic artists to archive the image they needed for a poster they were designing. This project was a steep leaning curve as it really showed me the difficulties of working within a professional environment.
HDR Panorama
I achieved well in this project as I approached it from a very unusual perspective, the brief is centered around using advanced digital layering techniques to create a landscape image with maximum tonal range. The image that I took is a macro image of a very small rock only a few centimeters across, I wanted to explore this unusual world of landscape in its smallest form, very different from the normal vast landscape photographs we see.
Environmental Portraiture
this brief suited my style of photography very well, as I want to move into editorial photography it was the perfect brief for me to test out my skills. We were set the task of taking two images of unusual occupations, one indoors and one out doors. My subjects were a barber and a tree surgeon, each posed its own unique problems. When shooting with the barber the main issue I had was with reflection of the lights in all of the mirrors, as I had to use off camera flash for the portrait. this was a difficult issue to fix but I managed to alleviate the Problem with carful positioning of my light. When shooting the second portrait the main problem I encountered was the pace of work during the day as the tree surgeons never stopped meaning I had to photograph them as they worked.
Painting with Light
in this brief I took a vey abstract approach which actually lead to a very stylised low key portrait. Light painting usually involves lots of garish colours and light trails but I had already experimented with this as far as I wanted to in my own time. To try and think of a more unique idea for an image I looked at a diverse range of contemporary artists and eventually being drawn to the idea of stencilling. Stencilling is a technique that lends its self well to light paining as it allows you to block in areas of light and dark. for this image I used an over head projector and a handful of spaghetti.
No comments:
Post a Comment