Fashion: Constructed image

Task 1

Iconic image

Dovima with elephants by Richard Avedon, August 1955.

I consider this image to be iconic because at the time of shooting this would have been regarded as pushing the boundaries within fashion photography. The contrast between the raw natural skin of the elephants against the elegance of the model is very drastic. The image has also been printed so that the black evening dress (Dior) does not disappear into the shadow of the elephants. The setting is within the elephants enclosure which usually would be off limits to everyone apart from the keepers, this is a dangerous place and the chains around the feet of the elephants enhance this, but Dovima an elegant couture model with subtle imitation in her pose does not show any fear. It suggests that by wearing this dress you will become fearless and able to stand with these giant animals and also gave women an icon, someone to aspire to be like at the time. 

Task 2

Street casting

I took a bit of inspiration from Jergen Teller's 'Go-sees: Girls Knocking on My Front Door' series, but instead wanted to capture a model after a fashion show, when they still have their hair nicely done and make up is perfect. I suppose the thing that inspires me about this person is that no matter how many different clothes she wears or how many different looks she is given by hair stylists and mua's she will still be the same person at the end of the day.

I didn't know this person and felt a little bit awkward when asking to take her picture but being a model she was used to her photo being taken, feel like I should have made her stand somewhere else as the background is horrid but did not want to take too much of her time and looking at other street fashion photos the backgrounds are not much better.

Review - The Environment part 2

In the second part of this assignment we had to look at the urban space, the city. We also had to pastiche another photograph, which was also to do with the urban space.

Firstly, I chose Brassai's 'Paris after dark' as the image that I was to pastiche. Finding the right location during the day was quite difficult because you are unable to see how the lights will affect the street, so this meant quite a bit of time was spent wandering around different areas of towns at night to see if anything would be similar to Brassai's image. I found a street that I thought would work due to the shop signs and the shop window lights though the area was much lighter than in Brassai's image.

For my own ideas into the urban space I decided to look more into the people that you would find there, the people that lived, worked and visited the city. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to show the differences between the people that work there and the people that visit. This led me to Martin Parr's image of Athens with the two different cultured tourists; this made me want to capture images of tourists taking photos of the attractions within the city. For the people working in the city I looked at Harry Callahan's work and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia's, which is quite similar, but because I wanted this series to work as a comparison I did not want to have tightly cropped images of peoples heads. I kept my distance as I did with the tourist images and tried to capture some similarities with the composition, in two of my images I was able to get a single character to stand out this linked these together and in the other two I have leading lines which draw the eyes through the scene.

I enjoyed spending more time in both darkrooms, I have gained more skill with printing and feel that I have progressed with not only my photography but the concepts behind the images as well.

Review - The Body

This is the second part of the assignment where we had to find someone that either lived in Medway or attending the university.

I am quite interested in fashion photography so I thought that I would try and find a student studying one of the courses in fashion. After asking a few people around the university I was lucky to find a girl that was studying fashion textiles, this course is were students actually make their own clothes completely.

I took some inspiration from a few different fashion photographers that mainly use black and white film. The photographers, which I looked at, were Albert Watson, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, these were the three that stood out the most with their studio shots. The main thing that I took from looking at them was the way that they all used the lighting to create their images. I ended up using the butterfly light set up that Albert Watson had used in the images that I have used as my references. This is quite a flattering way to light female models/sitters so I thought that it would be appropriate to use.

With this image I wanted to create a story about how the student came to a finished piece of work, I got her to bring along her sketchbooks, lots of materials that she would use and some finished pieces. I also thought that using a material background rather than a standard studio colorama would add to the effect of a fashion textiles student making clothes. There was also a manikin in our studio that fashion textile students often use, so we decided to use that which, again emphasises the idea that this person makes clothes.

I am very pleased with the way this image has turned out, even though you wouldn't know exactly what this person does you would be able to tell that it was something to do with fashion and making clothes and that was what I wanted to show.

The body - Test strips and final

After the shoot, first thing to do process the film and make a contact sheet. Then I am able to pick which image I think is best at showing the story of this fashion textiles student. 

There were a few that I wanted to print, some I drew crops on and others I dismissed straight away. I eventually chose one that initially I labelled with a question mark. In my opinion this one had everything in it that I wanted and basically told the story of how the student got from her ideas in the sketchbooks to a finished piece.

After selecting the image that I wanted to print it was time to start on the test strips, the exposure time for the print was 17seconds at grade 2. This test strip looked very flat or dense and I wanted to add some more contrast, I added in some grade 0 at 2seconds and grade 5 at 3seconds. The grade 0 is mainly used as the base as it has the lowest effect on the contrast, if you didn't add anything else the print would be very gray with very little tonal difference. The grade 5 hits blacks and the whites basically making them one or the other, this causes quite a lot of contrast.

The test strip on the right is quite close to how I want it, the exposure is still 17seconds but I have added the grade 0 and the grade 5 which has given the strip more contrast, you are still able to see a lot of the detail within all of the materials in the image too. I added just a few more seconds of grade 5 to the last test strip on the left which gave me the contrast that I wanted and also left enough detail in the blacks.

My final print of Hannah, with a small narrative going on in the image, which is what I wanted to show. I did use the same lighting from my diagram from the earlier body post, this was the butterfly lighting set up. This set up gives the sitter a little shadow under the nose, it is also one of the most flattering set ups that can be used when shooting female models. 

The Environment task 2 - Test strips and finals

So just to recap, for this part of the assignment I wanted to photograph people within the city without them noticing. I suppose I wanted to capture them unawares in their own space like Harry Callahan and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia but I did not want to go to the same extreme as they did, I wanted to show the environment that the people I was photographing were in.

I took my camera to London as it is a hot spot for tourists, I went to several locations and waiting for the right moment to capture the type of image I wanted of tourists taking photos of the attractions and of their friends with the attractions behind them. I also wanted to capture images of people that work in the city and thought that by shooting this at a slow shutter would show the difference between these two different types of people. The tourist, generally, spends a lot of their time stood still looking at everything around them whereas the working/business person will possibly be in an office most of the day and then be in a rush to get back home.

Below are the test strips and final images that I chose to print.

Colour printing takes quite a while to get right especially if there are more than one light source all of which are different. This is something that I had a bit of trouble with as I wasn't sure which one to correct. 

It was quite clear that the first test was far too green and yellow, so this had to be adjusted by changing both the Magenta and the Yellow. 

There is a chart on the wall next to the colour darkroom which tells us how to get to the correct colours by adding or taking away certain amounts of magenta and /or yellow. I did this quite slowly as I did not want to go too far.

I eventually got to a test that was neutral around the central character (with a bit of help from our technician) but the only problem now was that the print was a little to light. This meant that I had to add  a few more seconds to the exposure to darken it, there was also a chance that this would change the colours that I had just spent so much time trying to correct!

Above is the test strip with an extra 6 seconds which made it darker, which gave it some more contrast but this did in fact change the colours slightly so I had to decrease the magenta by two on the final print.

This image also had some mixed light within it, but fortunately starting at the same area as the one before gave me an area that was neutral and where I could print from.

Because I was using daylight balanced film, when I came to print one of my images that was shot in daylight it came out extremely cyan. This meant that I had to decrease both the magenta and yellow by 40 so that the colours would be corrected to how I originally saw the image. 

After making a few adjustments I was much closer to getting a full print, I decided to print another test strip a bit lighter because I was loosing some of the detail in the shadow areas.

This image was shoot in the daylight too so I was able to start with the colours being nearly exactly how they needed as I used the same amount of magenta and yellow as in the other tourist image. I just had to tweak the numbers a little bit as the initial full print was slightly red.

Here are my final prints, like all of the test strips they have been scanned in, unfortunately my scanner isn't big enough to scan the whole image in with the border which is one inch (so you'll have to imagine that).

Stop and Stare/Constant Velocity

Tourists at Trafalgar square during the day taking pictures of the fountains and male tourist with a DSLR looking around for things to photograph. I was watching the people behind near the fountain about to photograph it when the man in the middle walked into the frame, I quickly re focused on him and got this shot which shows the whole stop and stare idea that I was looking for.

This image was shot near Liverpool street station, it is of a walkway that goes past several offices where a lot of business people walk through. The slow shutter allowed the movement of the people to be captured as blurring, though it appears that the character in the middle has hesitated about walking in front of the camera because his left leg is quite clear compared to everyone else. This image has similarities to the tourist one above because of this central figure and because there are other people behind.

I think that I was quite lucky to have got this shot of a man taking a picture of the sunset with the houses of parliament right next to him. I had enough time to compose this image with the handrail of the bridge leading up towards the tourists and even though you cannot see the clock of Big Ben you are still able to identify what and where it is. I also found it funny that you can see sunset's pretty much anywhere in the world yet people still photograph them, especially when next to a London landmark.

This is the last image within my series, I think that it is the weakest out of all the images because there isn't really much clarity as to who these people are. You are still able to get the idea of constant movement and rushing around in the city because you can see a skyscraper in the distance on the far right and all of the people are a blur.