// J A C K //
The second person being photographed in this project is Jack who is leaving for university this summer (August ’17). Jack’s parents are separated so I gave him the choice of which home he wanted to use for the first of the two shoots. His Mum’s house features a lot of throws collected from various trips, posters and prints cover a lot of the walls and there are chilis planted across the windows. The natural light comes from the window on the left hand side of the room and there is a central light hanging above on the right which adds a yellow-toned luminance to the room. I was keen to mirror a soft kind of aesthetic similar to Sian Davey’s images from her ‘first love’ series for this project. Working both digitally and on 35mm film, I started in the house by setting up the initial image. This first photo is a front facing portrait with the model sat facing forwards towards the camera. On my Canon 5D, I used a relatively high shutter speed to capture a crisp and clean image with the ISO set accordingly. My instructions to the model were to face me and remain as neutral as possible. The point of these first home images are to stay as blank and neutral as each character can. The external environmental shoots will be the characterised ones with light and life in them reflecting the energy of each area.
Rather than add an entire contact sheet below, I have chosen six photos which ultimately came up as the strongest images in terms of both colour, lighting and composition. All of these images have been edited in photoshop in order to adjust the colourings and white balance in particular. Because I typically shoot in RAW on my Canon, the level of post-shoot editing I can do is much greater than if I was working with a standard JPEG image. I have used adobe Bridge and Camera RAW to edit the images below gently increasing the temperature of the room and the shadows.
The final image I select from this shoot will depend more so on the second set of images for this character. I don’t want to decide on a photo now that may not work with its sister image.