Magazine Photograph Collection Task

 The photograph is a mixture of style with the elegance of the clothing and the renaissance background and then the woman's unhappy face and neck tattoo.

 This photograph clearly displays the subjects beauty, highlighting the hair that the product supposedly was used on. The light is directed at her face which brightens the hair ad adds shine., to make it look sleek and healthy.

The rule of thirds is used here to fill the frame if the advert and give a sense of composition.

Studio Practice

My peers and I had the task of booking out the studio and getting

to grips with using the hot lights to create different studio setups,

producing a range of photographs with various effects.

The two photographs above Have Been Taken using one hot light on the right side of the frame casting a harsh shadow on the left side of the subjects faces.

In this photograph we added a soft box over the top of an additional hot light to the left of the frame.

 The two images above show a before and after shot when using a reflector on the left side of the frame to bounce the light back to the shaded side of the face creating a softer tone.

In this photograph we used the same principle and reflected the light back to the opposing side of the subjects face.

For this photograph we placed a hot light behind the subject so that the camera could not see it and pointed it to the back of the subjects head creating a rim glow.

Keeping the rim glow we then added the lights to the front of the face to get a nicer composition.

In this photograph we placed a hot light behind the subject and faced it at the backdrop. This made the white background extra bright removing the creases in the sheet in some places.

We then moved the light to behind the backdrop and shone it through making a silhouette.

Here we used a soft box on the left side of the frame and a brolly on the right side.

Here we placed props into the scene.

To create this strong silhouette we placed a hot light pointing at the backdrop behind the subject and turned off all the lights lighting the front creating a sharp black figure.

In these images we exploited the camera, hand held and tried different angles to create different compositions. The can evoke effects of dominance or weakness respectively.

The final couple of images were shot using a fisheye to create distorted angles of the subject.

Using Flash To Emulate a Photograph

 For this task me and my peers used a modelling photograph of Fred Perry to recreate in the studio using the studio flash kit.

This is the result we reached. We had to use a snoot with a honey comb attached to direct the strong light from the above left of the frame and also using a reflector we bounced the light back up to the under side of the chin.

My Final Shoot (Triptych)

Four the triptych I first of all wanted it to fit in with the style of photography I had used for the on location shooting and so I used the flashes to take a selection of photographs of my skateboard related items on location but as you can see the flash did not fair for me well at all as the shots were all way over exposed and I was not getting a good back ground as before. The only difference was that I was shooting just after sunset and could not book the flashes out again as they were fully booked for when I needed them. I decided to then book the mini studio and try with that and that neither turned out very well for me.

I turned to the University studio and booked out the studio flash kits and the studio and using a white back drop with a flash brolly and flash soft box I captured my images for the triptych there.

I found that the Images where all pretty much good to go after taking them thanks to using the lighting to get the colours and contrasts that I wanted, meaning that I did not need to do much post production work in photoshop.

Final Triptych Images:

My Final Shoot (Portrait)

I booked out the Nikon d40x and the Nikon Speedlight flashes to shoot my subject on location in Birmingham at a location that I know as a spot skaters go to. I knew that at this location there are concrete block benches but skateboarders use these blocks to perform trick on. knowing this I could get my subject to sit down on the bench and then obviously show this in the picture giving another pert to the story; giving the viewer enough visual information to show what the skateboarder uses the concrete bench for. before going to the location I drew down some possible compositions for my photographs and how I would like my subject to appear in them. getting these down onto paper saved me time thinking about it too much at the location but instead I had a plan.

When I collected the camera gear from the DAC morning of the shoot I had never used a set of remote flashes before and so I was little nervous as to whether I would be able to pull of the shot I wanted so I decided to watch a youtube tutorial on how to use flashes on location.

On Location Flash Video

After watching the video I was a little put off as I couldn't find anything on how to make the scene more dramatic having the under exposed background and perfectly exposed foreground, as the only videos I came across showed how to balance the background exposure with the subject. So i decided to take my housemate out into the back garden before we set of to practice and try to figure it out for myself. When thinking about what the flash was doing I realised that it lights up the particular area that it points at with a burst of strong light. meaning that everything else should be under exposed just as if I purposely underexposed any sort of picture. That meant that i could change the aperture to not let as much light into the body of the camera and therefore take an under exposed image but because the areas the flash was reaching were so bright those areas reached perfect exposer (after a little bit of trial and error).

 This first image shows the subject hit by the flash. I managed to gain perfect exposure for both the background and subject. Which is not what I wanted.

The second photo came after a bit of a eureka moment and I figured out how to under expose the background away from the foreground subject.

At the location I played around extensively with different lighting techniques and positions giving me the advantage of building together the photograph until I figured out the best ways of doing so. I wanted to photograph my subject using a harsh light so that it would add a more dramatical effect onto the image so that the skateboarder would work well with the rest of the image qualities. I was very inspired by lighting not only the model but the scenery around them to show the environment that they are in. I eventually settled on placing a single flash almost next to myself pointing at the side of the concrete block adding more depth into the image.

Here are a selection of raw photographs to demonstrate the process I went through:

Here I begin by using one flash to highlight the face of the body of the subject.

I then focus that light to the face of the subject, creating the harsh contrast I was after.

I then get the second flash to light the skateboard and feet of the subject.

I then add another flash to light up the side of the bench bringing the scenery into play with the image more.

Now I have everything set for the right set up it is just getting the final photograph taken.

 And finally the raw final photograph.

This is a photograph of the set up after I had taken the photograph.

I found that taking the images and creating the scene I wanted in the frame through using studio techniques, meant that I pretty much had very little to do post production as I had done all my editing at the shoot in a sense. The only adjustments that i had to make was to warm the temperature of the image up as the raw image was quite blue in colour. I also used the clone tool in photoshop just to edit out a single cigarette but that was on the floor by my subject and edit out dust marks that the lens must have shown which was unknown to me t the time of the shoot.

shooting in RAW meant that I also had the option to sharpen the image whilst maintaining a much better quality than a JPEG. This made the picture crisper and the dramatic effect much greater.

Okay so in the post production I opened the RAW photograph up into RAW editor which allows me to have access to a much wider selection of tools that will maintain a good quality to the image. First off, I think that the original image is too blue in colour maybe because the white balance on the camera was thrown off, I'm not too sure, or maybe that is just a characteristic of using the flashes and camera in the way I did. But that's fine because the RAW editor can easily fix this by using the temperature slider to warm up the image to normal again, as shown below.

I then looked closely into the image and found that by using the sharpening slider i can make the image appear more crisp as you can see in the before (above) and after (below).

I then took the image into photoshop to make some very slight tweaks to the image so that it had a nice tidy finish.

This is the RAW Edited version of my image and as you can see it doesn't have many changes that need to be made.

A small change that I made was to use the clone tool to edit out this cigarette but from the image.

After that was gone I discovered that the lens must have had dust on it as I noticed small dark marks in the picture.

You can see the before and after above and below this caption. 

Having done that My final Photograph was Complete.

Creative Control and Art Direction

In studio photography there is a lot more to making a photograph than placing a subject in front of the camera and pressing the shutter button. The whole point of studio photography is that you can create the scene that you want, and to do this you need to control it creatively and direct the scene to how you want it to best convey a message.

Creative Control and Art Direction... of eggs.

This photograph says:

1. Broken
2. Clean Lines
3. Strong Colour

The photographer has achieved this by cracking the egg very carefully and positioning it so that the broken edges can be seen against the black background, as if the white surface was continued (on an infinity curve) the pale colour of the inside of the egg would be lost. The strong colours of the yellow yolk and the egg white can be seen distinguished as they would have a light source over them to brighten the colours effectively making the egg look rich. The plastic surface of this photograph also suggests an unnatural setting; the white surface could be a kitchen work top?

This photograph suggests:

1. Farm
2. Natural
3. Organic
4. Fresh

The obvious difference from the first photograph here is that the scene has gone from a simple white surface and black background to hay nest, suggesting that these eggs are freshly laid in a chicken coop on a farm. The soft light that is used to light the eggs gives a sense of quiet, and rest as the eggs lay in the nest, opposed to the harsher light of the cracked egg in the first example.

The background of studio photography is very important and normally would be considered something secondary to the photography but in the studio it sets the context; the scene of the story, to convey the message stronger.

In this photograph the background is very basic/simplistic and so creates a very pure/clean scene for the egg basket.

Remembering the 'Rule of thirds' makes for a better composition in a photograph. As humans we look for balance in images and using the 'rule of thirds' or symmetry will make the image more aesthetically pleasing to view. One of the most crucial medias for this to be used in is product advertising, as the whole idea is to make the audience desire the product, so making it look as appealing as possible is going to bring the most success.

This is an example of a magazine advert that uses symmetry and the 'rule of thirds' to make the picture more appealing! It keeps the audiences eyes on the advert for longer, hopefully making them subconsciously desire the product more and more.

Although this photograph of two differently sized eggs doesn't exactly follow the rule of thirds or use symmetry the balance of space in the picture is appealing.

The point of view in an image can be very effective to create weird and wonderful perspectives, exaggerating the truth, or even adding humour into an image such as this example of an egg being held up in front of a bald man, playing on the shape of his head.

Controlling the depth of field wisely can guide the viewer to where you want them to look first (normally the most important place) in the image. (The wider the aperture the shallower the depth of field).

Using different lens' can also change or perspective and make objects seem further appart (using a wide angle lens) or closer together (using a long lens to compress the relative distances).

If a photographer is working with a graphic designer perhaps for an advert considerations to where the designer wants text to go must be taken into account or the text will run over the subject in the image and will look very messy.

In this Image you can see that the photographer has left space top and bottom of the subject to allow for the graphic designer to add in text/logo etc.