#melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass

[melissamorrell]

Children Photography 

- Studio Set-up; white backdrop, flash lights, white umbrellas.

Here are my best final studio photographs of children. 

[melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass]

Evaluation

Considering my work throughout this assignment I think my work was successful. I think it went well because of my photographic techniques and skills i.e. lighting, composition, vantage points and more.

The reason why the lighting went well in my photo shoots is because with the sports shoot I used two soft boxes 1 on both sides of the model at a 45 degree angle two get evenly spread lighting across his face and clothes and no shadows on the background. Meanwhile with my other shoot I used one lighting source to the right which created a lop shadow around his nose and a light shadow on the background to the left, which I wanted to create with this model when wearing the black suit. I wanted this because I found having a small amount of shadow in some fashion photographs especially shooting men in smart outfits adds a little extra feeling and atmosphere to the model and the image.  My camera settings for my fashion shoots were set to the same settings because I used the same light output which made having the same IS0 and the same shutter speed which was good.  My camera settings were ISO 400 – 1/125 seconds and the aperture was about f/10 which is a small aperture that lets less light strike the sensor and making a large depth of field making the whole image in focus. When taking my photographs of the watch in the light tent, I changed my camera settings twice to capture didn’t images. When photographing the watch with a wide angle so you can see a lot of the watch in the frame the settings I used were IS0 400 – 1/125 second shutter speed and an aperture of f/10. These are the same setting to what I used for my fashion photographs which will give me the same effect of a full focus. However my second set of settings were ISO 100 – 1/125 second shutter speed and an aperture of f/5.6 – this is where I have a large aperture which allows more light to strike the image sensor and giving me a shallow depth of field. I did this by increasing up the light output to allow more light out. 

The reason why the lighting didn’t go so well in the video clips is because I hadn’t set my camera setting back to the appropriate white balance. This is because when I took the photographs I set my white balance to flash but I didn’t change the white balance back to tungsten as the lights I was going to use were on all the time and not flashing. Not doing this gave some of my still life video clips a warmer light tone which I didn’t want. To improve this I could have re-filmed the certain videos or I had an idea to change each individual clips into black & white to see if that would make any difference. In my opinion I that having warmer lighting tones in my videos was good for me because then it gave me the idea to change my video into black & white which made a huge difference to my video for the better. Having the video in black and white was good because it added to the dramatic feeling and atmosphere to the video and it also gave off an old feeling towards the video which I also liked. Overall I found a solution to a complication and ended in a good outcome.

I think my posing for my model for both photo shoots went well however I still think I need to improve on this area to find more interesting and effective poses. Before my photo shoot I did effective research of men’s fashion photography with google images and photographers to see how males pose as they are different from women.

I think my composition improved during this assignment because I thought a lot about how I was going to pose my model and how I would photograph from different vantage points and what close up shots I wanted around the watch. I did my research beforehand on how different people advertised watches and when it came to shooting I remember what I saw and generated new ideas which I wanted to experiment with.  I thought about what I wanted in the frame and what I didn’t want and this made it easier for me to think about my vantage points.

I think my video is successful because of the filming techniques that I used to make it effective and I used panning; camera hand held; tripod, changing focus; close up, mid shots and wide angle shots, product movement, short clips and long clips.

The product movement was effective in this video because I used this technique a few times in different video clips which is where I moved the watch instead of the camera.  I also think changing the focus is effective as it makes the audience expecting somethings and wanting to see the end result. From videoing out of focus to manually changing the focus while filming is skillful and effective for the video.

What I also think that went well was the sound track that I choose because I achieved what I picked out to do, which was to pick a suspense and dramatic soundtrack as well as having the videos in time with the music which worked really well and made the full video feel dramatic. 

I found my investigation to be useful especially at the beginning of the assignment when I did my light testing and developing my knowledge of posing models and generating my own poses. Researching and investigating was a big influence on my work as fashion photography wasn’t something I wanted to do at the beginning of this assignment. Throughout this assignment I have been looking at a lot of photographs from historical to contemporary artist images like Chris Davis and Terence Donovan and several images off of google – this was to give me ideas of vantage points, composition, what to include in the frame and what not to, poses and lighting. I also looked through magazines like Vogue and dazed to look at their poses and lighting techniques.  My research for my video was useful because i look at two watch commercials for an omega watch.  Watching these to videos have inspired me and have given me ideas for my own video. There are two things that i want to achieve in my video from watching these videos are: the sound track in (omega globemaster) this is because it has a suspense and dramatic feeling to the music and secondly in both clips there are close ups of the watch, which was achieved when using either a macro lens or a macro filters. This is what i really want to achieve because it will help me gain my photographic techniques using macro filters and it will be really good when filming as it will make an effective commercial.

During this assignment I have learnt how to record from my canon camera and how to make a video on Imovie; How to get a really shallow depth of field. I also found an interest in fashion photography and that I want to develop my skills further and I know how to take better still like photography using the lighting tent and macro filters.

Working on this assignment I really enjoyed what I did and what I decided to do from the beginning, so I was motivated to do well on this assignment. I found working on this brief interesting and would like to develop my skills with fashion photography and still life photography while using the light tent.

[melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass]

A Lorus Watch

I do NOT own the soundtrack to this video. I own the videos in this video clip. I was tasked to rebrand any brand i wanted and create a video. I chose to to ...

The video above is my first attempt at a watch commercial fashion video. I think this video went well because i mixed both fashion and still life videos together; I used several filming techniques; the videos were in time with the music; I achieved a dramatic suspense sound track and i added i added a photograph of the watch with the companies logo and slogan. 

The filming techniques that i used to make an effective video was panning; camera hand held; tripod, changing focus; close up, mid shots and wide angle shots, product movement, short clips and long clips.The product movement was effective in this video because I used this technique a few times in different video clips which is where i moved the watch instead of the camera. 

What I also think that went well was the sound track that i choose because I achieved what I picked out to do, which was to pick a suspense and dramatic soundtrack.  Which is also good because i got the videos in time with the music which worked really well and make the full video feel dramatic. 

What I could do to improve my video is the lighting. What i mean by this is that in my clips sometimes the lighting could become a warmer tone instead of a white even colour. I could improve this by going into imovie and adjusting the colour balance in every single clip or i could try and change my clips in black and white to see if that looks better. 

From here i have gone though each video clip and changes the colour to black and white and increased the contrast slightly to each clip. By doing this the video have become much better .i.e. the lighting and it makes the video feel complete as having the black and white has added the dramatic suspense and also makes the video slightly old which i like. However i kept the ending of the video in colour as it shows the logo and the watches true color.  

My final video for this assignment is the video below which is the black and white version of my video, which in my opinion looks better. 

[melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass]

Post processing

I have chosen my final images that i want but i didn't need to edit them in Photoshop at all because I only needed it adjust them slightly in post processing. Here are some examples of what i did to some of my images below. In most of my images that I adjusted i only needed to increase the clarity and contrast however in some photos i needed to slighting adjust the highlights and shadows. 

In my opinion i think this is one of my best images because i think i captured the lighting and composition well. I also think this because when i opened my raw file to do the post processing I really didn't need to change a thing. However i did because i wanted to improve the clarity in the watch - so I increase the clarity and i also wanted a stronger contrast between the whites and blacks - so I increase the contrast slightly. 

As this photo is of the full face of the watch i wanted the photo to have evenly spread lighting without shadows and to have a strong contrast and clarity. In the post processing of this photo i decreased the highlights and shadows but also increased the whites and blacks. This was to make the contrast of the different shades of blues better. however I didn't need to adjust the contrast panel at all, so then i just increased the clarity slighting to make the watch pop out a bit more. 

With these fashion images i adjusted the slightly differently from the still life photographs because i don't want them same out come. This is because I don't want a high strong clarity. However with these images i still want a sharp image but I also want a soft image at the same time. With this photo I decrease the highlights and shadows quiet a lot meanwhile increasing the whites and blacks slightly. I did this because with the blacks i wanted a strong colour but I didn't want to lose the detail. So therefore while adjusting the blacks i was looking at the trousers t get the right shade and detail. More over i did still slightly increase the clarity to bring out his facial features slightly. 

With this image i wanted to brighten up the white background slightly and darken his skin slightly. With this image i increased the whites but I decreased the highlights because I didn't want much light on his face then i decreased the shadows and slightly increased the black this is because I wanted to darken his skin but keep some detail in his clothes. With this image I slightly increased the clarity to bring out his features however when i opened this in Photoshop I ‘quick selected’ the watch and added a high pass filter which increased the watches clarity only. 

[melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass]

Personal Brief - movie

Concept: A commercial fashion video - this video will be mainly made of clips of the watch and then some clips of the model with the watch to show his fashion sense. 

location: studio

Equipment/props: the watch, macro filters, tripod, canon digital camera. 

lighting: soft lighting from two softboxes from both sides - upon the watch. Using softboxes when videoing the model - even lighting. 

Model: young male model

mood/atmosphere: Dramatic, suspense and cool. 

Music sound track: Suspense 

[melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass]

Contact sheet - photo shoot

In these two print screens blow show a contact sheet of my photographs that i have taken, from my still life to fashion, from sorts wear to a black suit. Through out these photo shoots i was practicing my photographic techniques like shallow depth of field, composition, manual camera settings, low vantage points and more. 

[melissamorrellwhcbrettsclass]

Test Poses

Here are some test poses before i carried out my main photo shoot. I went to the LRC and looked through fashion magazines to look at how the models where posing. With the photos I found in the books, I photocopied them so I could recreate the poses with my models. From looking at those poses of what i liked and got my models to achieve them, so i knew that i could achieve it in the future and they would be effective. 

From there I also got my models to pose to how i would like them to pose because I thought of some poses that would look good in my main photo shoot, so I wanted to see if they would be effect before my main shoot. 

I like this pose for a lady because it makes her look elegant and the way she isn't looking at the camera is effective because it comes across that she doesn't care what others think and that she likes how she is. If i were to use this pose another time, I would use this when my photographing an women’s fashion shoot wearing elegant dresses.   

I got this photo from another photo that i have - this photo is a cropped version of another image. From looking at other images online and photographers, this idea came to me to crop around the watch and I caught this interesting pose and composition which i find interesting.   

To get this pose that i captured i was using a small prop black chair which I liked and took a few poses with him shitting down. I wanted to experiment with a chair because not all models and clients stand up so its good practice to know some poses of models sitting on different sized chairs.

 I liked this pose because he seems friendly and relaxed but also in control. Remembering this pose can lead to other poses that can make the model look dominate to the camera and in the photo. I also like the composition of the image .i.e. rule of thirds because you have got his head and shoulders in the 1st/3 and his body is in the 2nd/3 and then his legs and feet in the finally bottom 3rd of the image. However what i like most about this pose and image is that you can leave enough space around the model which i find good as it doesn't fill the image up. 

[melissamorrell]

Paris November 2015 

Photographed by: Melissa Morrell