Spare studio time

When shooting the dancers on the weekend, I had some extra time, a make up artist and the girls willing to stay. We decided to have a bit of a play around with some shots for my personal portfolio, and also to let the girls have a bit of fun in studio.

I have wanted to do a dolly themed shoot for a while and this gave me the perfect opportunity as Beth Sykes has a small frame and a pretty face. I dressed her in bright pinks and used dramatic make up focusing on the eyes. I chose to bleach out a lot of the background light to create a airy fairy feel to the shoot. We also tried several poses to give the impression that she was a puppet and rag doll.

Friday 27th.. Food shoot

Two weeks ago Tony gave us a brief to bring in a food product to shoot. Because of time my shoot was postponed until the 27th. As Christmas is looming, I have decided to shoot something festive and bring in mince pies.

I have looked on a couple of image libraries as to how to shoot them and am going to try and achieve three different shots.
One will have a background of lights and berries with a drop focus centralising the mince pies. The second will be a more tight in shot, focusing on the filling in the pies where I will try to make it look as appetising as possible. The 3rd shot will consist of propping the product with icing sugar and clotted cream. This will be the last one, as it will melt quickly under the lights.

I have collected together a variety of props including plates, cutlery, ribbons, tablecloths, fabrics and lights, and will construct the set from scratch.
I feel well prepared for this shoot and am really looking forward to it, as I do not often get to soot food produce in my current job.

Part 3...

Beth is a gymnast and so is extremely flexible. This was great as she could bend into all sorts of positions which she could hold effectively, creating some very striking images.

After the shoot I was told about strobe lighting by one of my tutors. I looked into this and found the image below.

This is something I may be able to create on a shot such as this at a later date in photoshop by layering several different images over the top of each other creating the same effect.

I have not shot someone who can move like this before, and would love to create some interesting shots with a circus style location and with a stylist and someone from hair and make up.

Part 2...

Steph was an all round dancer and so she focused more on different shapes and angles with a strong posture to try and create some dynamic lines. Again I have kept the same lighting set up mentioned in part 1.

Lycra leggings, extremely flexible people and lots of laughter...Part 1...

After shooting the head shots for the three dancers, i needed to shoot some full body poses. This was to be done to show their movements and also provided an image for their portfolios as well as mine.

I had a mixture of dancers as one was a ballerina, one a gymnast and one good all rounder. I decided to focus on this and play to their individual strengths for their pictures. Again I used simple lighting, similar to the of the set up for the head shots. I remove the polystyrene from the front and added another soft box to the front left hand side of the set to add a little bit of light from the waist downwards.

Some shots of Beth the ballerina can be seen below.

Old building shoot...the gothic church

Over reading week we were required to shoot an old building of our choice, and select 5 of our favourite images.

As I live a considerable way from Wakefield, I decided to shoot the church in the middle of Doncaster town centre. This church is currently being extended to become a cathedral, so the spaces that I could shoot were limited, as I did not want to get building equipment in my shots.

Before going on location to shoot, I decided to do a bit of research into church building photography and the location itself. I already decided that I wanted the church to look mysterious and almost Gothic and looked at several photographers, including Jay Soto.

He specialises in Gothic photography and shoots mainly people and old buildings.
Some of his work can be seen below.



I love the coldness created in several of theses shots. I think that the blue works well with the bricks and give a real Gothic feel to the pictures. He also shows the detail of the buildings he shoots, which was something I tried to replicate on my shoot.

The day of the shoot...

I looked at the weather forecast for the week and planned to shoot on the Tuesday, as the weather was ideal with blue skies with some cloud, therefore giving lots of natural light. I also calculated that between the hours of 11- and 2 was when i would be able to get the best light both for daylight and shadows on the building by using google maps and working out which way the building faced to the sun.

Some of its most prominent parts of the buildings are some spike like turrets and these gave real character to the building. I experimented with different filters and settings on my camera to generate my pictures.

I have imported my original shots into lightroom and edited them slightly by changing the contrast, saturation exposure etc. As you can see I have tried to replicate some of the tonal values found in Jay Sato's pictures in my own images but also kept my own style.

Dance pictures!!...

As mentioned before there was a set criteria for the type of shots that we needed to create for the dancers shoot, one of which was a head shot of each of the dancers. These shots can be seen below.

Beth



Beth Sykes



Steph



I have used very simple lighting on a plain white background which is lit with consists of two spots either side. I have then used a large octabox on the right hand side as a fill light and placed a large piece of polystyrene at an angle in front of the model to bounce some light back in. Finally i added a key light with a honey comb from the left which was placed slightly behind the model to clip their hair and give it a bit of shine and depth to my lighting so that it was not flat.

I think that this worked well and I am pleased with my shots, especially considering that they are not professional models, the day was a great success.