Arron's DGP Blog

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Student focus project evaluation

If I’m being honest the reason I picked to do a shoot revolving around people is it’s something I don’t feel very confident in and so I thought it would be a great opportunity to increase my competency. I wanted to take a risk with the focus awards as I felt in my comfort zone on the open brief.

I’ve notice that I can struggle to coordinate a large group and so I used this project to strengthen the skills needed to. When my make up artist (2 hours before the shoot) cancelled on me rather than getting stressed out I took a deep breath, told myself that I’m 2 hours from now I would look back and think I was silly for getting worked up and then cracked on looking for an emergency MUA that specialised in retro. An hour later I had a MUA booked and she was making her way to my shooting location.

I knew from my tests that I wanted to try and shoot outside. Along with the hard light I wanted my background to be something a bit more gritty. With the ears the plain background the over all feel was softer and did not match with what I wanted to do. Instead of using photoshop I took my model outside and tried a few different backgrounds before picking the brick wall. It gave to the sense that my huntress was just that. The ears were very important to conveying the overall message. They give context in my parody to the meat and are also a sense of humour to an otherwise serious topic i myself am passionate about. They aid in my effort to try and shoot a piece that comments on our cultural conceptions of diet and health. The very fact looking at my photo is obscene is the point. Were not hunters. We don’t chase animals down and eat them raw and looking at a photo that implies we do unsettles us to a certain extent. My character is a personification of two cultural extremes. I used the same lighting plan from my tests but removed the background lights and instead just had 1 beauty dish 24in and one reflector for fill. I kept it simple, easy to manage and yet very effective. I did try using my 5 and 7 foot umbrellas but the light was far too soft and made the photos have a beauty vibe that I was trying to stay away from. I put a grid on my beauty dish to narrow the light and focus it on my model and have no leak over to the wall. I shot on a 24mm equivalent lens to give me a less Fashion or Beauty vibe. I intentionally shot the photo a little darker than needed to make sure I had 100% of the information in my frame. My sensor is iso invariant so it does not matter if I shoot at base iso and push later 1 stop or simply shoot at 400 other than the fact that I can selectively brighten my photo and keep my blacks as grain free as possible. Not something I would do for a normal shoot but I only had 1 keeper to edit all the way to print and it seemed worth it to make sure I got everything. What have I changed since the shoot? I’m planning on spending my summer break portfolio building on StarNow and I want to build relationships with MUAs and stylists so the team end of the shoots is much more flawless. I have people that want to work with me and I just have to make the effort to build a regular team for this year. I also want to use the studio at Rave a lot more but with my own equipment. Knowing not only how the gear works but how you can troubleshoot alleviates a large amount of stress from the shoot and gives you some flexibility but play on the day. While I do actually enjoy having a lighting plan ready for my “keeper” once I’ve got what I want I naturally want to explore. Knowing the gears means being able to be certain I have what I need. Julian told me a few years ago that keeping things simple is the surest way to getting effective shots as a student and I have taken that to heart with my minimalist set up. After the shoot it made me realise I had a lot of stuff I did not need. Some of the greatest fashion photographers to ever live including Richard Avedon used one light for a lot of their work. If I can’t take good photos with what I have, buying more stuff will not help me. This year that is really ringing true for me. I have thoroughly enjoyed pushing myself into new ideas and styles for this project and am glad I stepped out of my comfort zone.

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Selecting my final outcome 

Before shooting I wanted to quickly get some photos I knew the model would be happy with to her warmed up and out of her shell. The bottom 3 photos are what I started, after showing her she seemed much more relaxed and involved. Selecting the final image took me a few days, I drew over what I liked and did not like about my outcomes. My biggest peeve is things leaving the frame such as hands or ears. I wanted comfortable space around the model to crop in a little. I got her to really let loose and play around between frames and so trying to frame a technically perfect photo in the dark while you’re model jumps around swinging meat is not the best idea of a shoot with limit time and no budget for a reshoot. I knew my client wanted an A3 print and that I could achieve a 300DPI print with less than the 24MPs my camera has and so cropping / sharpness would not be an issue. I placed the dominant eye dead centre of the frame along with the meat. I broke some rules to use some others. What really sold me on the final image was the symbolic way she was holding the beef to her heart. I think it makes for a more interesting photo that someone would look at longer. It adds depth and a little mystery.

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2 hours before my shoot, I’ve put so much time and money into this moment. I will fix this and my shoot will go as planned. 

Update: After frantically googling I managed to find a make-up artist with 14 years experience in retro beauty. Luckily by only paying my test model in headshots, I had it in my budget to afford her fee of £140.

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Testing Looking at what I can do with a single grey backdrop. Also looking at placement of props and jewellery. What works: The dress, the jewellery, the meat, the ears What fails: The soy, the soft light, I find the backgrounds really boring, even when jelled for another colour.

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For the test shoot, I want to try using a grey background and simply by changing the argument of my lights see how many different looks I can get.

I want to try shooting jelled lights onto the grey background to effectively change its colour. After speaking to Matt my first idea of shooting on grey then changing the background later in photoshop did not seem like an efficient way of changing my background. I also want to try shooting outside as lots of the work I have looked at has textured backgrounds and it would be more efficient than trying to do get the same look in Photoshop.

I intend to keep the lighting simple, 1 key light, 1 reflector and 2 SpeedLights set up as optical slaves to use for either hair lights or jelled effect lights for my background. I would like to test the different looks between my 22inch Beauty-Dish and my 7-foot umbrella.

Equipment checklist

1 Main body 1 back up body 2 32GB sd cards

1 400W wireless strobe + hoe shoe controller

2 Optical slave SpeedLights with jells  

7 foot umbrella

22inch Beauty-Dish

Grey background

1 light stand + 1 backdrop stand

Tripod

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Dresses for the shoot. Looking to contrast blue and red with opposing backdrops or backgrounds.

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Talent for focus project.  

Both models have worked with magazines for vintage looks and the model to the right played English royalty in a channel 5 tv show. I wanted to be sure to pick models that really fit the aesthetic I’m going for.

My budget for the shoot was £250 so far I have spent £200 have got 1 model (The tester model is being paid with headshots), 4 outfits, 2 sets of shoes, 1 MUA for 4 hours and all my props and a studio for 2 days of shooting. I will be doing test shoots on the 16th then my final shoot with my models on the 17th. 

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Open Awards project evaluation

What worked I really enjoyed working with post production transform tools. I knew what I was shooting would not look anything like final outcome and that I had to shoot the photos with the post process in mind. This was pretty doable as I have worked with abstracted architecture before and so it was not difficult to get into the mind set of “what will this look like once I get it on the PC”

This is the first project I have shot that is actually telling a personal story rather than just something I’m interested In.

This had many benefits but also made it harder to shoot lots of varied outcomes or even flexibility on what my outcomes looked like but for this project I thought of a style links to emotional connections and then worked from there. I wanted things to be flat, grey and lifeless. Once I built the visual narrative in my head the photos flowed pretty freely and I gained lots output by controlling my input.

What failed

The second shot of the 3 is the weakest. If I had more time I would have liked to replace it with something more powerful. For me this project does not end with the deadline and will be something I work for some time. My one big mistake was trying to merge 4 shots into one then making an outcome. The big issue there was I could not get the 4 shots to line up and ended up having to use 1 image and cropping it. Luckily it does not take that many MPs to print an A3 and if my math is right I sill have plenty. Going forward with this project I would like to try and drop the post production considerably and instead use specialised tools to shoot architecture such as a tilt shift that I am looking to invest in for my 5D. It was really fun playing around with perspective but nothing beats the feeling of getting it right in camera.

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Final shot for the project and surrounding architecture.

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Practising with local architecture before shooting house. 

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More look boards this time focusing on hair

Am limited by the model's hair 

Really like the curls 

Keep it simple! 

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Data for the underlining idea of my shoot 

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Angie McMonigal

I really liked Angie’s concept, she did a whole project where she made “blankets” out of different cities, stitching many different photos into one outcome.

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Look board of vintage posters.

Red and blue come up more than any other combo

Playful 

some are very tongue and cheek 

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Looking at Claude Monet for colour inspiration.

I have really forced myself to think in terms of blue and red for this project and to dive deeper into my concept I’ve looked at artists from different mediums from graphic design to Impressionist painting.

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More reading for the project  

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Arnold Böcklin and the wider Symbolism art movement.

While looking at the Impressionist movement I came across Arnold and the Symbolism movement by accident. Unlike the research based on colour what made these photos stand out to me was the posing of the subjects. The subject placement seems to break a lot of the rules. I would like to try out some of these poses on my test shoot on the 16th