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AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Unit 2 Portrait

Window Light – Post 1

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Window Light:

Window light is an excellent, free light source. It can have the same effects as bigger, more expensive lighting equipment. A large window is pretty much just a huge soft box. It will diffuse light into the room and around the subject you place in front of it. The earliest photography studios didn’t use fancy electric lighting. They just used big windows. It can also create interesting shadows as well as the window itself being a part of the composition itself which can not be achieved with any amount of light.

Mood Board:

My Response:

Best Images:

AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio Photography and Rankin

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John Rankin Waddell (born 1966), also known under his working name Rankin, is a British portrait and fashion photographer and director.  Rankin is best known as the founder of Dazed and Confused magazine (along with Jefferson Hack), and for his photography of models including Kate Moss and Heidi Klum, celebrities such as Madonna and David Bowie and his portrait of Elizabeth II.  His work has appeared in magazines such as GQ, Vogue and Marie Claire.

Rankin visited South Africa in 2010 with BBC to make a documentary  titled, South Africa in Pictures. In the same year, Nike and Bono’s R.E.D commissioned Rankin to shoot for Nike’s global campaign to fight and spread awareness against HIV/AIDS. The campaign was called, Lace Up Save Lives.

In 2011 Rankin started the biannual fashion, culture and lifestyle magazine, Hunger and launched Rankin Film to produce and direct his own commercial and editorial film work.

Rankin |

Practical Responses to Rankin

Contact Sheet of Shoot

One Point Lighting:

Studio Lighting | 7772
Studio Lighting | 7759

These photographs are examples of 1-point lighting as one soft light was used to light the subject.  I feel these work well as studio lighting examples. due to the lighting and the positions the subjects are in.

Use of Flash:

Use of Flash
AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Street Photography Photo shoot

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Street Photography Photo shoot

This blog post is about the photo shoot i carried out in the streets of town in St. Helier Jersey. The focus of this shoot was portrait photography and i was aiming to capture a natural essence of everyday life in the town through the view of the camera without having staged or positioned photos.

Definition of street photography:

Street Photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents  within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic. Therefore here it is worthy to note that the kind of street photography our project is focused on is portraits. I chose to go for a more candid approach to collecting these photos and therefore as we are collecting portraits, all my finished pieces contain people in them.

Difficulties:

One difficult aspect of this portrait shoot was the fact that some public members may not like their picture being taken. Therefore i used this theme of being unnoticed in a lot of the photos i took with a minimal amount of disruption to the public that i could use for example not having flash turned on or using the zoom to collect close up features instead of getting in peoples faces, or way.

Contact sheet with best images:

Here is a contact sheet with my best images from the portrait shoot.

My favourite image edit:

I edited this image because i find its the most focused and intricate portrait I collected of a person. It shows an elder gentleman with a cap on walking by and is effective because of its simplicity and the unusual angle it was taken from. It has a look of double exposure however, its is just the levels of color turned up and down

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Unit 2 Portrait

Night street photography

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Christmas light switch on street photography

For my next attempt at street photography, I decided to take photos in town at a Christmas celebration. I thought this would produced some good outcomes as there would be a lot of people compared to my last attempt, and I therefore thought that I could find a wider variety of more interesting people to photograph. Since there would be more people, I thought that I could blend in a little more and maybe be able to capture some more candid images of people. However, I also took portrait style images of people where they were looking straight into the camera. I also tried to find interesting backgrounds that would makes my images look more attractive.

Contact sheets

Best images

Analysing

Context

This is an image that I took of a Christmas parade dancer while she was in conversation with one of her friends.

Visual

Visually I think that this image is very successful. I like how the subject was captured in the centre of the frame, and how I manged to capture her laughing as it gives the image a positive atmosphere. I also like how there is a lot of lighting due to her costume, as it makes the image look more interesting and colourful which would captivate an audience.

Technical

As this image was taken at night in the dark, my ISO was set to 1600 and my shutter speed was set at 1/60. These settings helps me to get this image perfectly exposed. I also used flash to capture this photograph to fill in any shadowing that would’ve happened due to the uneven street lighting.

Concept

I think that the happy expression and positive atmosphere along with the Christmas nature of the photo shoot, represents how this time of year is truly abut happiness and not about being materialistic.

 

Context

This is an image that I took of a child on the Christmas parade train, as he he leaned out of it to try and catch the foam “snowflakes” coming out of the top of the train.

Visual

One element I like in this image is the foam snowflakes. As some bits were falling very close to my lens, they ended up not being in focus as my priority was to capture the child’s expression. I like how this looks as I think that it adds more detail to the image without taking attention away from it.

Concept

I think this image shows how people should appreciate small details in life. While I took this image there was a lot going on, 100s of people crowding around us, confetti being set of, a choir singing yet the child chose to focus on the snow.

Technical

 

 

Context

This is an photograph I  took of a lady just after the Christmas lights had turned on. She caught my attention as she was dressed in a bright red jacket, and was wearing a lot of fur. I caught this image the moment she turned back to look at the lights on the tree

Visual

Visually, I think this image is very successful. It it well exposed and it is sharp making it good quality.  The use of my flash meant that she wasn’t wash out by all the background light. The angle I captured this image from was also very successful as I got the whole of her face in the photograph.

Concept

I think that the way she is so intensely staring at the tree and the lighting is really interesting as it may make people wonder what the woman was thinking while she was looking.

Technical

For this image my shutter speed was set 1/60 and my ISO was set on 6400, as it was very dark outside and I needed as much exposure without machining the image look noisy. For this image I also used flash so that the woman in the image was evenly lit, as there were many lighting decorations everywhere that caused uneven lighting.

AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio Photography: Case Study

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John Rankin Waddell:

  •  also known under his working name Rankin, is a British portrait and fashion photographer and director.
  • Rankin focuses on close up head-shots of the subject, using a variety of facial expressions and props to create an interesting and intriguing image.
  • Rankin makes use of both grey-scale and colored photography, and through using a studio as the setting for most of his portraits, the background of the image is often left a bold white, which draws maximum attention to the subject in the foreground.

Here are some examples of this works:

here our some of the images we took as we were inspired by Rankin:

My favourite Pictures out of these are:

I like this image above as it is very simple and compared to Rankin’s work it seemed to very well with it, for example we decided to add the crown to see the effect it would have with the light I think this turned out very well, also I like the position of the face making half dark and the other half in the light. this was one idea that Rankin had , I thought it came out very well as we wanted to.

I like this Image above the light has caught her hair and has made it look like it was golden and a different colour, also the light on the face is again half and half, this was ambition to experiment with the light. I thought it was very simple again and and the sharpness of the photo is very significant due to this being one of our expectations.

These outcomes I think have come out really good, as they have come out very similar to Rankin’s work, I think that these are very simplistic.

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio photo shoot

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This is a photo sheet of the whole shoot, the green markings show that I will use the photo, yellow means i might use it. Blue lines mean that I will crop the photo along the lines.
I used two point lighting for this photo, the blue light from the left creates attractive shadows, and the warm white light from the right helps make the skin appear more tanned and makes the whole photo look more real, instead of looking staged.
This photo has been edited to appear brighter and more grainy, this has been done by adjusting the saturation, gamma correction etc.
Here Layla is playing the guitar, her placement creates a show which is offset to the right which makes the image more powerful. It is also composed of neutral tones which complement the simplicity of the acoustic guitar.
In this photo Layla’s hand gestures create emaciated shadows across her face. The only light source is a soft box which helps create bold shadows.
For this photo I decided to experiment with blur. The photo came out blurry so I decided to blur the rest of it more so that the centre of the image looks sharper in contrast with them.
This is structurally my favourite photo as the middle is empty. The right side is really dark which diverts the attention away from the middle which is the weakest part of a photo.
AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation, Component 2 ESA, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio Photography

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Rankin

Is a British portrait and fashion  photographer he is also the founder of ‘Dazed and Confused’  magazine  and for his photography.  He has work with many famous people, including models, Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, celebrities such as David Bowie and Madonna and is known for his portrait of Elizabeth II. His work has appeared in magazines such as GQ, Vogue and Marie Claire. In 2011 Rankin started the biannual fashion, culture and lifestyle magazine, hunger and launched Rankin Film to produce and direct his own commercial and editorial film work. Rankin was destined for life of an accountant until he discovered his interests lay somewhere else as he drop his accountancy studies and began studying photography instead. Rankin’s work has a distinct patterns of using white backgrounds, or single colour background, which helps to concentrate all focus on the person he is shooting. The blank background creates almost a blank canvas in with the person is the paint, the more expressions and feeling in the persons face the more detailed the canvas becomes. He is very much a studio photographer and works with artificial light and flash photography to capture the detail on peoples faces.

Image result for john rankin photography

Image result for john rankin photography

 

Image result for john rankin photography

Lighting

  • Why do we use studio lighting?  It allows us to create natural lighting effects in a variety of situations its easy to  control and to adapt to fit the needs of the shoot. Also with so many options available nowadays, it doesn’t have to be confined to a studio.
  • What is the difference between 1-2-3 point lighting and what does each technique provide / solve

    Key Light

    Key Light

    This is the main light. It is usually the strongest and has the most influence on the look of the scene. It is placed to one side of the camera/subject so that this side is well lit and the other side has some shadow.

    Key and Fill

    Fill Light

    This is the secondary light and is placed on the opposite side of the key light. It is used to fill the shadows created by the key. The fill will usually be softer and less bright than the key. To achieve this, you could move the light further away or use some spun. You might also want to set the fill light to more of a flood than the key.

    Key, Fill and Back

    Back Light

    The back light is placed behind the subject and lights it from the rear. Rather than providing direct lighting (like the key and fill), its purpose is to provide definition and subtle highlights around the subject’s outlines. This helps separate the subject from the background and provide a three-dimensional look.

  • What is fill lighting? Fill light is form of supplementary light mainly used to lighten shadows in an image. Fill light is often used in portrait photography to create a contrast between the image subject and image background giving the scene a sense of depth despite the final product being 2 dimensional. In this situation the use of fill light also reduces the overall dynamic range of the scene allowing for easier selection of the exposure settings required to capture an image. When fill light is correctly applied it does not significantly impact the main light source of an image.
  • What is spill lighting? Light spilling is where light falls where it was not intended to fall, creating a hazy, blown out look at times.
  • What is Chiaroscuro ? It’s the strong and bold contrasts between light and dark areas in a photograph.

 

Ring Light

Two Point Lighting

Three Point Lighting

Chiaroscuro

 

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Street Photography

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Street Photography

What is street Photography?

Street photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places.  The images captured when taking photos in the street are immediate and happen often quite quickly no member of the public stands there and stages this out therefore all images happen by fate.

For me there are a few ways of interpreting the way someone takes photos under the theme of ‘Street Photography’ In these examples some of the images were taken a long time ago.  For street photographers they have seen,through images,changes in clothes, appearance and just the way individuals have interacted with one another for the past hundred years or so.

There are many artists that are linked to street photography here are just some examples:

  • Bruce Gilden
  • Henri – cartier Bresson
  • Garry Winogrand
  • Weegee
  • Robert Doisneau
  • Vivian Maier

These are some quotes that photographers have said or wrote whilst out and about photographing the streets and whats inside it.

“Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.” – Garry Winogrand

“I love the people I photograph. I men they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them”- Bruce Gilden

“Don’t wait. the time will never just be right” –  Napoleon Hill

Below is a video on some more examples of street photography :

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation, Unit 2 Portrait

Arnold Newman

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Arnold Newmans Photograph of Alfred Krupp (1963)

 

The context behind this image is Arnold Newman essentially was asked to photograph Alfred Krupp (by himself). However when Alfred found out that Newman was Jewish he no longer wanted to be photographed him. Newman insisted of Krupp looking at his portfolio before making any final decisions. Finally Krupp just agreed and the photo was taken and published in 1963. This image was taken in front of whats believed to have been a train factory which was used to deport Jews off to concentration camps. Krupp allegedly used slave labor to make weapons and help the Nazis with the extermination of Jews. However it is believed that Krupp ended up in jail because of his un-thought actions.

Having first looked at this image without knowing any of the background knowledge i wasn’t too keen on it.  I didn’t like it because there’s quite a lot of elements going on in the photo in terms of objects wise. additionally the photo being under exposed also makes me not like as there’s quite a lot of dark and tones you wouldn’t normally see if the image was a happy image.  Looking closely at the mans face he looks like hes scheming something it looks sinister.  Having further investigated the image i can now see that Alfred was actually trying to make himself look evil and that make out to be quite powerful.

The color of the image is quite rusty and dark, by using this effect on the picture it allows the focus to be directly in the middle of the mans face.

Arnold Newman –

Recognized for his incredible ability to capture the spirit and personality of his subjects, Newman is credited for his work in environmental portraiture and having countless world leaders pass before his lens.  Born on March 3, 1918 in New York, Newman began studying painting after moving to Miami with his family.

Newman’s career quickly escalated as he explored the idea of photographing his subjects in their own personal environments. He first began photographing artists, often with their own work, and quickly moved on to photographing some of the world’s most prominent figures. With careful composition and dynamic design, his environmental portraiture managed to evoke a sense of the person’s inner spirit. Newman explained, “I am interested in what motivates individuals, what they do with their lives, their personalities, and how I perceive and interpret them.”