To Advance DWB 21/22:
This Unit is a continuation of the ideas and themes set last year in to begin, asking us to further conceptualise our ideas but also to become more aware of career choices and our place in the industry as photographers. There is a particular emphasis on self direction and employment as this will be a key part of our professional lives going forward. Using support from professional bodies such as the AoP will improve the legality and legitimacy of work. Finally a series of technical briefs will enable us to hone our skill set to complement business acumen.
The briefs themselves break up into a series of individual shoots that will encompass many different photographic styles, and pieces of equipment we will need to familiarise ourselves with. Having shot these throughout the term it is then our task to compile all of these individual images into a portfolio, which will be both physical and digital.
First response to the brief:
Please excuse the poor image quality. But the image still shows what is most important which is the lighting and tone of the image, which is something I seek to replicate in my own work but adjust to my own liking. I really like the 'sunset' strobe and red gel that has been used here as it draws the focus right into the centre of the image, but without giving any very harsh lines to the picture, almost everything blends into the black. Also I think the proportion and composition of the frame are satisfying, the way the subject is centre Fram but offset gives a more candid relaxed feel without taking away from his presence. his head also reaches the radius of the circle behind him which is important, as it is a convention of all portraiture to have something in the exact middle of the frame because that is where our eyes are drawn in an image when we first look at it. For my own attempt I would like something a little brighter, so there is a little more information given by the face, as well as the gradient fade in the image being a bit more gradual, so there is more colour and a bit less black.
Although obviously not a photographer, Leonardo Da Vinci is probably the person who inspired this work the most, as his work employs a technical precision that I would like to incorporate into my own, and he was also hundreds of years ahead of his time with critical thinking and problem solving, hence his work being so immensely popular after his own death. Because he was such a profound mathematician, Da Vinci would compose his pieces so that all the proportions would be to scale and all the lines in an image lead into a central vanishing point usually in the middle of the Frame. The knowledge and understanding of human anatomy also allowed him to show very realistic poses and facial expressions which play on the subtlety of real life. He never gives anyone outwardly masculine or feminine expressions. This neutrality then makes us focus on the implicit level of emotion that all humans are capable of showing and studying in one another, and in this nuance is where all the deeper emotional content lies. This will be easier with a camera, as we are taking snapshots of our own points in space time rather than recreating them on canvas. Sfumato is another mainstay of Da Vinci's work, possibly his biggest pioneering technical contribution to art and something I have come to appreciate greatly. Sfumato refers to the gradual blending and fading of colours to black without any bold lines or borders. He employed this technique due to his own study of vision and optics using the Camera Obscura, which could be used to project moving images onto a wall. what he found was that the eyes were able to focus on an entity with the frame or focus, whilst the background would gradually be obscured and out of focus. Not only does this give a more photorealistic image, but more importantly produces a wonderful sense of atmosphere without needing to make any one tone more prominent in the image than another. It is almost similar to black and white prints that work of black as seen in a Photobook called the firm.
Here we have a rough lighting diagram for my test shoot, which I will review and improve upon after it's completion. The plan is to have a strobe light and maybe a red filter over it to produce a ''sunset' onto the backdrop which the subject will then stand in front of. This light will be elevated directly behind the camera and angled down. We then have an additional much softer light on the right hand side of the image which will be reflected onto the subject's left hand side in order to illuminate the face a bit more, but also give a more dramatic shadow to the right hand side of the face. The camera and subject will be facing each other horizontally parallel, as phase one cameras have a direct middle focus, requiring me to shoot face on, however I will experiment with the pose of the subject in order to capture them most beautifully as well as to produce the atmospheric effect desired. I think a wider lense will prove most useful in this shoot due to the way we have to crop the hero image for the submission, however this is subject to change through trial and error throughout the shoot; as a tethered workflow allows me to make live adjustments to the setup based on how the raw images come out. I will also need to shoot with the studio as dark as possible ideally.
Kit list:
MacBook Pro
Phase one Camera
35mm Lens
50mm Lens
Hard Spotlight with snoot
Red Gel
Elinchrom light in softbox
Reflector
White Background.
Here I have the first exports of my attempt at the studio shoot. I think I succeeded in delivering the tone and atmosphere of my references pre shoot. It was both useful and fun to go about making this image, and shooting with a large format camera, which I haven't used before. I didn't experience any real problems with the set up of the shoot, as I had used the equipment the day before with AJ, however getting the light in position and the right softness was the real test, as well as playing around with exposure. I am a big fan of using trial and error to learn and experimenting with work a bit. Eventually I found the point when the sunset light was in the right place around his head, and the exposure was set so we just experimented with pose, and I colour tagged all the ones I liked with the help of AJ. Also the images both go in the A4 overlays given to us for the hero shot.
Above are some setting used for post production of my images, but this is subject to change dependent on the workshop and feedback I get.
On Location shooting:
somethingIHoweverIIcemeteriesForrest. There is something touching about being surrounded by such a big green space, it is a reminder of what was here before London became to widely urbanised, and also a reminder that life is constantly growing around us, even in places we dedicate to commemorating those who have already experienced it to a finality. Equally most of the still life and nature photography that I look shares the same affinity to darker more misunderstood places as I will show below.
David Lynch's The West:
I look at and take a lot of inspiration from the work of David Lynch, who is in my opinion a quite talented photographer as well as a director. This collection is from a journey Lynch made the the west of America specifically through the dessert. In this collection Lynch manages to make very dramatic and detailed images of something normally portrayed as very vast and lifeless, however Lynch uses the contrast of light and dark to accentuate the fauna and the landscape. As with all of Lynch's work there is an eerie, foreboding sense to them due to the colour grading and wide angles with lots of depth in the horizon. It brings about the same appreciation for the size of the South Western country as Wim Wender's Paris Texas, and how man is constantly in awe of things much greater than themselves.
Amanda Norman is a Liverpool based Photographer who specialises in gothic and horror photography since 2004. She has travelled to many places around the UK taking pictures of things considered more macabre. She too makes very atmospheric pictures, taking advantage of the natural light to make the subject seem ethereal. She does a good job of using buildings/monoliths to give a sense of structure and composure to the images whilst the backgrounds build tone either opening up the space and appearing heavenly or much darker. She says she likes to explore the dual nature of mortality, and how life and death have a mutualistic relationship, rather than being separate entities. Also like me she enjoys working in places others do not necessarily go to make art but I think her work is very beautiful, even if it is left of field.
My 1st Round of on location shooting was successful, as most importantly I managed to find somewhere suitable to capture in order to deliver the mood that I set out to create. My landscape image with the tree is the particular highlight of my shoot, very wide and eerie with lots of high and low lights in there. The lion's share of the work for these images had to be done in post, which is all about accentuating what the image does well and selling that as much as possible with capture one and photoshop. I enjoyed doing this, as it makes me feel like I am making a way with creating my own style, as well as with finding my 'niche' within the industry, which may be gothic and horror images. I also think with the changes to my shoot of AJ, these images mesh very well compiled, as the black and white leads one idea into another as the subject changes, showing me that my technique can work in multiple different environments. This is also where I have started to use masks a lot on capture one to have more control over my edits, particularly with inverted masks to control the middle portions of my images, enhancing what your eyes are most drawn to.
Second Round of shooting: Connections
The second round of shooting involves a less specific brief, this time we are not aiming to get hero shots that crop to a4 in both orientations, this time we are aiming at making the most intriguing single images possible as the assignment is like a mock submission for the Sony awards 2021. I will not be making any actual submissions to the award as I don't have the confidence or the equipment, but I will treat the activity as if I was going to anyway. The theme for this years awards is connections. I like this because it is a very broad subject matter with a lot of different angles that we can go for, so in my images I will build as many underlying connections as possible.
Above is some examples of pictures that made the awards shortlist or won in various different categories. I think what is being made evident from this is that strongly composed frames with a nice big lush print is what they are looking for. There is very little black and white submission wise but that is not really of much concern to me, as I will have to contextualise my pictures with the others that I have taken. There is a lot of Talent on display. The winner Craig Easton with some beautiful black and white portraits of different households in Blackburn however is quite similar to what I am going for in the studio in terms of composition, I would just like something a bit more moody and brooding.
For my shoot in the studio I would like to carry on with my 'Gothic theme' if you will, as well as taking inspiration from art. This time rather than renaissance masters I am going a few hundred years back to Saxon times to look at gothic paintings of christ. I want my shoot to be loosely to be about the concept that everything in existence being created in the image of God, as well as being God itself. The idea of good at its root stems from idea that a deity would be able to create something from nothing which all living beings can do in some sense, especially those that can procreate. The sanctity of life also states that the holy spirit is in all of us, and that we all embody the creator by being fashioned as a reflection of their own image. For this reason I am going to have somebody pose as christ in this shoot as an extension of this idea, as all humans have the same connection to the spiritual and metaphysical, but our awareness and concern with this varies greatly. I also plan to use people who are very close to me in these shoots, because 'connections' is almost asking me to capture people who are close to my own heart but also people who will let the camera see into themselves when I am behind it, which is much harder to do when the model is a stranger.
For my studio shoot I have chosen two references in particular to talk about in terms of photographic inspiration. One of those being Rose Glass' Saint Maude and the other being photographer Kyle Thompson. I have chosen to discuss Saint Maude as I think it handles a characters connection to God very well, but also it builds atmosphere and exposition without ever having to make explicit answers of anything that's happening, something that will be crucial later on. I have chosen Kyle Thompson because his work is visually stunning and incredibly varied, but he is also very good at communicating mood and emotion through his images, he also builds a sense of intimacy with his self portrait work which will make my images very nice if I can replicate something similar in my own.
Above are some examples of Gothic era paintings of christ, which will give the actual inspiration for how my subject is posed in the studio. These poses are often quite simple and modest with a straight up perspective. I will have the subject dressed down so that modern clothing doesn't interfere with the atmosphere of the image. I have also picked somebody with a hairstyle which is not dissimilar to actual Christ. I think a minimal lighting setup will from one side will cast a nice soft shadow on the left side of the picture to represent the combat and connection of light and dark, and how it exists mutualistically in all things. I will also be using a cross, as that seems to be essential to representing christ.
My second studio shoot was a definite success in my eyes, having got out of it pretty much exactly what I intended to. The shoot ran very smoothly and everything happened on schedule. It took a bit of time for me to get the right distance with the 80mm lens and to get the flash exactly how I wanted it but working with the model between frames was very easy and he seemed to enjoy it. The post production process with these again was transformational, and all about making atmosphere around the subject. I did this on focusing on accentuating highlights but in a way that still keeps them soft, and then taking down the shadows and blacks which provides a more soft and complex contrast than is created by just using the slider. Apart from placing in photoshop to make them the right size for print, they don't need any extra cosmetic work done to them so I didn't do any retouching etc.
On location 2:
This shoot is going to be challenging, as I have to mix the lighting outside of the studio, but more importantly shoot something that can go with all the rest of my work without being repetitive. I am going to take a very different approach with this one, I am going to go out with my best friend who is a talented photographer to some different places in our part of Epping Forest and see what I can find. If I decide to take pictures of him I will avoid making him pose, as I think the closer to completely candid I can get, the more interesting they will be as part of a collective.
Above are some stills from The Road (2009) which I like because of how bleak but picturesque the cinematography is throughout the entire film. The setting is completely hopeless, the world is dying around everyone in it, but that doesn't take away from how striking and geometric it makes the scenes. I think the wideness of the frame on the subject places them up against something they know that they cannot conquer, but they are still so important as they are the only things that are still alive, in some ways making them more powerful than their setting. The mood of this is perfect for what I want to achieve in my pictures for this shoot, I also like the idea of going on a journey towards enlightenment and using what you find along the way as your basis for carrying on, always believing that there is salvation at the end. If you haven't seen this I highly recommend watching it, a truly wonderful film and book.
Here is a mood board of photo inspiration for my on location shoot by Bulgarian photographer Arslan Ahmedov. I particularly enjoy how he explores the surreal and the abstract with his work, but by almost folding it into the context, it doesn't seem like it has been constructed even though it has. The tones in his pictures are also very deep and atmospheric without always being deeply moody or unsettling. Playing with the normal and blending it with the abnormal is a nice way to create dichotomy in an image, as well as being thematically sound in my work and with what I am trying to build. Let us see how the adventure unfolds.
The two above are the output from my second and final on location shoot and I can say now that the shooting for this semester is now wrapped and can be considered a success. We ended up stumbling into this old sort of bunker which people has been scratching graffiti into for the last hundred years or so, I think the earliest one we found was from 1927. I managed to take a picture of Kai as he was walking into it at first which provided me with a nice portrait of him as he is turning, which I like because it differs from all my other ones, whilst still holding on to my current compositional motif, it also has a lot of lovely texture created by the walls around him which add a lot of colour and tone to the overall image. I also like the way that Kai's face does not say too much about what he is feeling or thinking, you have to use the information in the picture to place it in your own context which is going to play into the assemblage well. I edited these ones in a very similar vain to the last three with only one real key difference, which was in the colour grading. I decided to put some orange in the shadows on behalf of an idea from Kristina while she was watching me play around with them in class. I think it adds a bit of sepia warmth as well as a throw back look to more classical era photography where a lot of film would process with a slightly orange tint, like in images of Chaplin etc.
The portfolio:
Having finished the shooting for this semester, the time has come for me to actually build my portfolio in Indesign using my processed images. This is perhaps my most decisive phase of the whole thing as I have quite a clear vision of what I want to produce, and how I am going to do it, thanks to experimentation at the end of year one with our book project. I am going to create quite a simple photobook style portfolio, that works off black pages with all my images full bleed, and some as DPS full bleed. These will be segmented by text pages that will take you through the 4 acts of my semester. I want to do this because I have taken a lot of creative inspiration from film and the dramatic, so I wanted to pay homage to this in a subtle way, whilst it also being a good way to give story telling structure to things that have a loose narrative. I also think these screens can look great in movies depending on their use, but examples like the Suspiria remake and Kill list use these really well. This will also mean I can give the different ideas names, that communicate the meaning behind the pictures.
The main printed inspo for my portfolio comes from JBH's the firm, which is a book that I looked at in the library and aside from the many great pictures in the book, I was struck by how well it had been constructed to uphold the mood, and also how such a simple design can be very effective. I will be taking this idea forward to my own work whilst putting my own spin on this.
The book itself is an A4 portrait skeleton, with the text pages being made from scratch using a texture I made from sugar paper, and then text made of from the Adobe fonts. The picture pages are taken from a library of designs I made for myself, but they are just some full bleed photo boxes with some custom margines added to them to ensure that the picture marries well when printed. I think this would be best printed on satin or gloss and stable bound down the middle. Each image can also be taken out of the design and used as a poster in which people can re sequence my work on their own walls should they so wish to. As for the content of the portfolio, I have chosen not to give much explanation as to the exact meaning or theme of the images, but rather to let people study them and to derive their own opinions about what the work means, or what questions each segment might bing forward. It is also true that the book does not have a linear form of story telling unless you want it to, as there is no inherent relation between subjects however there is some room to see where the subtle similarities lie and what connections can be drawn between them. There is a beginning middle and end that I have considered, and there is a story arch, but this has been subjected to abstraction. If I was to do this again, I probably would make this a much longer more detailed piece of work that had more meat between narrative strings, which would allow them to coalesce at the end to bring some form of denouement. However I think the most important think about this piece is its mood and tone, which I am very happy with, and the photography as a stand alone I am also very happy with. I think I have succeeded in coming into my own, and experimenting with style and attitude which my work definitely reflects, as well as a real progression in terms of technique and raw quality. I have really enjoyed doing this semester and have gained a lot out of it, I hope you can see this in the work, as well as my made ravings.
