Managed to get my hands on a Wista finally, so I could go back up to London and shoot some decent film negatives. I ended up shooting photos of Canary Wharf from three angles around the city.

The first was from the latest location I found, looking east from Rotherhithe over the river. This was probably my favourite location as it was the closest to the buildings so the shot I got was much clearer and detailed.

The second location was in the same area as the first, except it was further west and away from the buildings. I chose this location because of the pond's location due to the buildings emerging through the gap in the trees. The lights around the edge of the pond also give great reflections in the water, creating a very unusual effect when combined with the exposure time.

The third location was the original place that I found and visited on numerous occasions to get the right shot, it is located on the other side of the buildings, and looks the other way - just behind The O2 Arena. This shot is also great because of the proximity to Canary Wharf, but gives another angle on the buildings.

I also shot a fourth location from the Isle Of Dogs itself, but further south and looking north. The body of water that I used for the reflections is one of the docks, but I didn't print the shot because the shot was full of camera shake. I suffered from this problem in all of my shots because I didn't have a sturdy enough tripod, and had to manually hold the Wista's shutter open for over a minute. The ice cold winds didn't help either, but considering the conditions, I think I did a fairly decent job with my 'ol digits.

In order to get a decent exposure over a minute, I had to use a much smaller aperture than normal, I ended up using the camera all the way down on f/64. I felt like one of the group :D

The Body: Production Shoot

These are my four final shots from my Production shoot yesterday, I'm really happy with the way they came out not only because of the quality of the prints, the correct exposure and focus etc, but also because I managed to produce some very decent shots, near enough what I wanted, within a 20 minute shooting period (because that was all the time I could get with the model)

Sides of A Coin (kinda)

This was one of my earlier initial ideas for my Body production shoot that I went back to later on to experiment with a little in digital post production. I had an idea of people having split personalities, and this was inspired by events in my own social life with friends. I wanted to experiment in creating a picture that showed "two sides of the same coin" of someone's personality. This result shows one half being a perfectly normal human being, lit up in the darkness of reality, whilst the other side represents the same person, but they have started to decay and crumble. 

A very strong contrast I think.

London's a Big City...

I managed to get up to London a few times over the last few weeks to shoot some test shots for my city section of my environment unit. Despite multiple setbacks thanks to typical London transport & other things, I was able to locate a few decent shots of the buildings at Canary Wharf from multiple angles across the river - thank God for the natural geology and shape of the river thames!

Quite happy with these shots, but I think I prefer them when they're black & white - even though there's a significant amount of nice colour tones in them. I just think the black & white looks more sophisticated & appropriate.

I hope to be able to go back to London soon with a Wist large format camera to shoot my final shots. :)

The Body: Test Shots

Wow, I look weird...

I got the honour of having my ugly mug snapped during one of our portrait workshops the other day... So yeah that's my face plastered over there to the left. :)

This blog post is really for me to show some of the various ideas I had for my portrait shoot.
I had a lot of ideas regarding a concept, but the one thing I really wanted to focus on was the idea of a portrait being a literal representation of a person. So a photo of someones face for example.

I was very interested in showing the differences between human facial features, thus started looking at the work of Martin Schoeller. His work inspired me to think about the idea of taking a straight-on photograph in order to show the person for what they are when they look at something/someone.

As good as this idea was, I felt that the photos themselves didn't look as natural as I wanted, in regards to the way they were lit, so I decided to experiment with simple Rembrandt lighting setups using my DSLR and off-camera wireless flash.

I experimented with this simplistic way of lighting, using my mother as a test model at home in my kitchen, I also tried using natural light instead of strobe flash to compare the results. I prefer natural light, but I have to use studio lights for this shoot. Bummer :/

I've always liked the idea of using multiple photographs in a 2x2 "quadriptych" style because it allows you to present more within a space rather than say one single photograph. I thought this would be a good idea because people often have different sides to their personality which sometimes cannot be captured within a single photograph. Doing it this way allows me to showcase more of each person at the same time.

I experimented again at home to try and figure out how I was going to light my shoot, because I'm planning to have the photos in a quadriptych, I want to keep them simplistic and almost identical. The shot below and left is, I think, to bright and lacking in tone because the subject's head is hiding the majority of the shadow behind to the right. To overcome this problem, I switched the light position to the other side and the result is a significant improvement, as seen in the photo below and right.

The decision to move the subject's head round slightly wasn't one that i took lightly, but I wanted a more human, and realistic shot instead of a mugshot that lacking in life. The shot below and right is a fairly accurate representation of the lighting setup, composition & overall look that each of the four final photos will be, just with a different model.

The lighting setup I will hopefully be using for this shoot will mainly focussed arount Rembrandt's famous style, I will be utilising a large softbox for my main light source, this will be located on the subject's left (camera right). This will hopefully create a very dispersed, soft light that will look very nnatural and compliment a woman's face. On the opposite side I will place a large white reflector to help give some bounce-back light into the shadow areas to try and lower the amount of overall contrast in the shot, but not too much as to wash out the shadow. I will also try to create an evenly lit, white backdrop using two matching light sources from either side of the shot, but out of frame.