The point of this photo shoot was to manipulate and focus on turning a persons body into shapes and shades making each part unrecognizable. This worked in some cases and in other you can clear see what it is. However I like the final product so that’s why I included it.
In Adobe Photoshop, I decided to create a mock-up layout/storyboard-type document that outlined the very basic, primary ideas and thoughts for how I may want to structure my magazine for the final product of this exam project.
I created a range of a black, portrait boxes using the rectangular marquee tool and then duplicated these to create a storyboard-like layout to illustrate and begin creating a rough draft or the structure of pages for the magazine.
The purpose of this is to give me a better idea of what I want to do – it will allow me to understand how many pages the end result may be and will give me more confidence to branch off from this to create a more precise ad specific page-by-page mock up of the magazine. Doing this task can also be used a yardstick to judge my progress so far as I can see how many shoots I have done and haven’t.
Through the process of research, planning and actual construction of this project, I have realised how difficult it is to do in the little time I have and therefore, I have decided to keep it very minimalistic and in-turn, the final product will likely end up more like a mini photobook and in a sense, a little like a look book for a fashion house may produce.
Furthermore, it will also be very difficult for me to create words and text to the extent to which other fashion magazines such as i-D and Dazed do because this is an dependent project and because of this, I ma happy to showcase more so my photography and have little inserts of text that accompanies the imagery at times, however, it is certain that there will be a question and answer segment for each “character” as such. This is what I have called my models because I am exploring their stories behind their fashion and showing this to readers, therefore, they can be branded as characters to this story of modern0day fashion in adolescent teens.
I reiterate that this is a very brief primary mock up of what the magazine may end up being because I need to complete all shoots first and then I can decide how I want to present my work and in what order but I understand this will likely change as I am producing the magazine but it is useful to have a vague idea before starting.
As well as images of nature I wanted my film to have a subject. The film is about the sun setting and what happens before it. I decided to include a subject because It made the film more interesting and easier to relate to and understand. I wanted my subject to be immersed into the different scenes I planed to capture, such as the grass and by the sea. I wanted the subject to be interacting with the nature such as playing with the grass.
I wanted to mainly focus on close ups of the subject because I wanted most of her identity to remain hidden. I tried capturing the particular important features though such as the lips and the eyes. The day that I choose to capture clips of the subject was poor because the sky got cloudy which meant the lighting wasn’t as good as I hoped. This meant that some of the clips where to dark. If I have time I may try to redo the shoot on a better day to get a better image quality. Some of the shots have a lot of noise because of the high ISO. However, overall I am happy with the outcome of the shoot.
For the last part of the film I want to create a link with the subject and the sun. As the sun disappears and sets behind the sea I also want to replicate this with my subject. I aim to do this by showing the subject running towards the sea, similar to how the sun seems to disappear.
During the easter holiday I decided to start my wabi sabi film project. It was difficult to find a good time to take the film clips and images because the weather wasn’t that good. I needed a day where the sky was clear so I could capture the different colours and the sunset. I decided to base my film during the evening when the sun is setting because that’s when the light is at its best because of the colours that are created.
Here is a further development of my photo book to display most of my final images from my project. I tried to display images that link together so that a story is created. I also linked images based on colour and tone. I really like how my book is developing and am very happy with the layout so far.
As I have previously stated, I intend to produce a magazine for my final piece for this project I am currently undertaking for my exam work.
I didn’t really have any ideas of what I wanted to achieve from my magazine cover and what I wanted to go for when producing the first few drafts if my cover because i knew that they would be drafts and that it would be likely I will change the cover’s layout or overall design for the final product. I began experimenting with different typography designs in Adobe Photoshop and I created one text design before the ones you see below but automatically decided it wasn’t what I wanted because it looked too polished and too f’forced’ as I was using default Adobe font types. I immediately took out my notebook and began handwriting the magazine title – which I already had an idea for in my head when I began – I wanted to call the magazine ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ a soon as I began the focus on teenage boys for the project because I felt it works really well.
The below images show the process of which I went through to create my current final draft of which I am very happy for and I intended to use this for my final product, however, with a few layout or design alterations if needed.
The images below show the process I went through to create the handwritten title and it was actually the first attempt which I used in my Photoshop mock up of the magazine because it had the look I was going for. However, it is likely I will re-produce this text again both on paper and then digitized into Photoshop because I know I can create a better version of this through more careful production of the specific lines to create stick men as well more polished looking letters. However, the look is supposed to be very rough and not clean and polished like a default font on software would because it is handwritten and I want to keep this authenticity.
After creating a couple of versions of the cover using fonts provided by Photoshop in their wide selection, I felt it may look more realistic and it would fit the theme better if I also handwrote the text ‘issue one’ and ‘£8’. I did this on the same piece of paper as well as drawing some arrows to add in also. I also drew a squiggly line to import into the software to use as an underline because I was not able to do this using the underline feature I usually would when working with provided fonts.
When I first inserted the handwritten text into Photoshop from an imported picture I took with iPhone of the notepad and the writing on it, I made it priority to remove all the negative space around the text – being the white paper. I did this through selecting the magic wand tool to manually select the white space around the text. This allowed me to erase the white paper which left me with the text – what I needed for the title to work. In order for me to remove this white space cleanly without the selected area bleeding into the writing, I had to apply some basic colour correction effects onto the imported image first to ensure the black writing was as dark and heavy as possible and the white surroundings was as light as possible to provide a clearly defined area to select so that I could erase the white surrounding.
After this, I noticed the writing was actually quite fine and didn’t stand out too much – as expected because I was not able to apply any bold effects to the type as it was not directly imported through Photoshop’s selection of fonts. To make the text I had imported stand out more so against the blank background I had chosen, I applied Layer Style effects such as a colour overlay to change the colour of the text as well as a ‘stroke’ to give a darker, more defined and bold outline to the text. I then, later on, applied a drop shadow effect.
This provided me the basis to move forward from to create tweaked and better versions of this primary design of my title.
The second draft shown above includes major alterations from the first version as I have imported a photograph from my shoot with Max. As well, I have changed the look of the title through changing the colour, positioning, size and removed the underlines. I have re-sized the size of the ‘issue one’ and ‘£8’ text aas OI feel this would look better once printed – I was taking into consideration the proportions and sizes of features once printed.
I have also produced a second version of the same draft but just with a different coloured background to give me a couple of options to choose from if this was what I was to go for in the final stages.
I needed to get more images of specific things such as flowers and nature so I decided to use the natural light to capture some image of flowers in my garden. I used a macro lens to capture these because It highlights much more detail and I can get a lot closer to the object. My aim was to capture different shapes and textures within nature, and I think Ive managed to so this within the shoot. I used a very small focal point because I wanted the background to be blurry so that the main focus was the flower.
I used Photoshop to edit the images…
On the 27th after school I conducted my second photoshoot using the body as the subject. I used the same model as the first body photoshoot because I wanted to keep a theme going. I also choose to stick with this model because its my mum and therefore could have deeper connotations relating to the theme of spiritual images and growth and decay. I used a micro lens so that I could zoom closer into certain details I wanted to highlight such as the creases in the skin. I photographed the models hands and face because I believe them to be the most important aspects of the human body. The shoot was done at day time so I used the daylight from outside to revel most of the details. However for some of the images I also used a flash because I wanted to illuminate the image more. I focused on particular shapes and textures in the skin because my project is about the insignificant things. Overall I am very happy with the result of this shoot.
I used photoshop to edit the images because I only wanted to edit them very simply because I had already used the camera settings to capture the image I wanted. I improved the image slightly by changing the brightness, the contrast and the vibrance of the image.
After school in the evening when the light was fading, I drove too St Aubins bay to do a photo shoot focusing on the movement of the sea. The light was good for the shoot because it was cool and bright which enabled me to easily capture the details of the sea. The light was also reflecting off the water which created a really nice effect. I used a canon camera for the shoot and focused in on the shapes and movement of the current. I used a medium focal point to capture the images because it was easier to get all the detail I wanted because of the constant movement of the tide. I had to use a very fast shutter speed to be able to capture the images in a good quality.
When editing the images I choose the best quality and range of scenes and objects. I edited the images using Photoshop because I wanted to do simple edits to each image rather then do them all as one block edit. When editing the image I simply changed the contrast, brightness and added more vibrancy to the images to make them more visually interesting.
As well as abstract close ups of the sea and the movement of the waves, I also captured different things that I noticed during the shoot. I captured these because I wanted to contain a variation within the series. I also edited these images in Photo shop to changed the brightness and contrast, and also to add more vibrancy to the images. I wanted the images to be bright and pure because this was the type of effect I was trying to create throughout my whole series.
After researching about William Eggleston and learning about why he took his sky images, I decided to do a shoot of my own of the sky and clouds during the sunset. I choose this time of day because the sun effects the sky by creating different colours which is a beautiful thing to capture on a camera. There are many different abstract shapes and textures that are created.
I edited the images using photoshop because I wanted to bring out the natural colours that were created. I am very happy with my result and believe it goes very well with my project because I am capturing something that happens everyday, but we tend to ignore or not notice. I have managed to capture something insignificant in a beautiful way.
The image below is one of the edits from my photo shoot of the sky during evening time. Its an image of a cluster of clouds captured in front of the dark blue sky behind. There is little going on in the image which is what makes it beautiful because its simple yet powerful at the same time. I really like the colours in the image because they have a subtle warmth within them created by the sun setting. This is the main difference between mine and Egglestons. My image is darker and more atmospheric because of the time of day the image was taken. The clouds contain a yellow and pink tinge which makes the image more visually interesting for the viewer. Eggleston’s image has less contrast of tones between dark and light. It also has contains less of a range of colours.
