Photoshoot 3 – 22/10/14

This photo-shoot, I went into the studio feeling pretty confident!
After having two practice shoots, I felt that I was ready and feeling rather excited to be working with not only a different model but also one of my classmates. Unfortunately, my model scheduled so thankfully my friend kindly stepped in (and I owe her a Starbucks coffee too!).

I had the studio set up ready for when my model walked in, we discussed what underwear we thought would be best and got the camera settings correct on my DSLR and then moved straight onto my Hassleblad… WITHOUT CHANGING THE SETTINGS!! *Bangs head repeatedly on table*.
This was a big photographer doo-doo and after developing the film I couldn’t believe what I had done.

Luckily, the images came out OKish, however my film looked very thin and disappointing – I went ahead and scanned the images in and with doing a slight boost on the scanning software I was able to recover parts of the images.
See below!

I had to do a lot of post production on these images – boosting the levels and contrast and having play about with the tonal range of the images to to bring back some of the detail. The images came out quite gritty-looking which I find works really well.
There is something about these images that makes the subject look quite vulnerable just wearing her underwear – the way people gaze at women nude and a lady in just lingerie can be seen in two different ways. Seeing a nude lady makes us think about the natural beauty of a woman – the skin tones, the curves of the body and there is something aesthetically pleasing that makes us want to value women in art and photography  – after all, women in art posed in this manner has always been popular genre. But seeing a lady in just her underwear changes the gaze completely – something like this can be seen in a more sexual manner, just revealing parts of her body to the viewer makes her seem like she’s teasing and posing in certain positions makes her look more appealing.
I am disappointed that I made such a big mistake for this photo-shoot, HOWEVER, I have decided to take this shoot as a happy accident! The film came out thin and rather under-exposed but I can work with this to help my photographs become a part of the Fragmented Body as part of this project I am doing at university.

These photographs are cropped to a certain manner so I can focus on specific parts of the female body and therefore develop my technical skills to ‘fragment’ this further. There are a number of things that I can do with this film – I can leave it as it is and head straight into the Darkroom and see what results I can achieve from doing a straight print.
I can also manipulate the films further – bury it, burn it, place it into bleach and see what weird effects I achieve. I plan on talking to tutor and technicians to see who I can look at for references as part of my research (I am keeping a Research Development Book (RDB) ). If you have any names then please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Let’s see what I can achieve!

Photoshoot 2 – 15/10/14

Wednesday 15th October I carried out my first Hassleblad studio shoot with a female body.
I had a wonderful model called Annie who studies at my university and she kindly volunteered to model for my project (and I will hopefully be using her again!)

The photoshoot went rather smoothly and quickly and Annie was wonderful to work with.
I decided to treat this photo-shoot as another test shoot and only asked my model to stay in her underwear, purely because I wanted to work on the curves and her body shape and was still getting use to handling the Hassleblad itself.
I was stupid enough to forget my tripod so I hand held my camera which made the photoshoot go at a reasonably slow pace but I had music playing in the background and Annie and I were deep in conversation. I managed to develop the film (after much cursing in the darkroom trying to get my film onto the reel for developing) and was able to digitally scan everything using the fantastic facilities UCA has to offer.
Below are some of (what I feel are) my strongest images from this shoot.

I went away feeling rather confident working with people for this style of photoshoot, however I felt that I was ‘winging’ how I wanted Annie to stand in front of the camera. Even though I was giving her clear direction of how I wanted her I secretly had NO idea on how I wanted her to stand/sit and was pretty much treating everything like a photographic experiment.

After having a Progress Review with the Photography’s GTA and around 8 of my classmates we all agreed that I should probably research looking into body forms and shapes to help me get a clearer idea of how models posed for paintings and photographs (which I will no doubt create a moodboard on Pintrest for purely for this) and to also research into the Anatomy a bit more in depth too.
I was also suggested to take a visit to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to look at all the statues and how they are carved and moulded.

NEXT STEPS:
* Look into body posture
* Look into body shapes – both feminine and masculine
* Look into Anatomy
*Try and plan a visit to the V&A.

Analysis of Two Photographs

After flicking through Bill Owens’ book Suburbia  I came across a photograph that jogged my memory. On the left, you will see a photograph from a collection of images my mother took as a child playing with close family friends (unfortunately we lost contact over the years) and underneath, you will see Bill Owens’ image.

Despite the fact that the two are different in terms of how the photographs are shot, they do have their similarities.

When I first viewed Bill Owens’ image, it jogged my memory of a photograph I believe my mother had taken of me whilst I was playing in my room. I managed to find the photograph in my mother’s personal archive of photographs.
Placing the images side by side, you can see the differences and similarities. Firstly Owens’ picture is monochrome and mine is in colour. Both photographs has a bed featured in the pictures, however the bed in my found image has been cropped out slightly unlike Owens’. My found image also features two young girls (one of them being me) where as Owens’ image only has one girl, but you can see the toys/mess in her bedroom more clearly than my image.
Just by viewing the images side by side, you can see what style of photography has been used to capture these two very different moments. Owens has taken more of a Documental approach to his image. His image shows the entire room, the girl sitting on the bed and the mess all over the floor. By taking this image he wanted to show the viewer the whole scenario as well as documenting the life of this young girl in this situation, where as my found photograph has been taken in more of a snapshot style. My photograph focuses more on myself and my play mate and the toys I have been playing with.  The angle of my found image is pretty much in line with my eyes  and the format of who my room has been portrayed may suggest that a “point and shoot” camera has been used, whereas in Bill Owens’ picture the whole room is displayed suggesting that a wide angle lens has been used.

Myself aged 5.

Bill Owens Image.