I want my zine to have black pages with yellow text on certain pages. Some of my photos will be very dark so I am hoping they appear as if they are emerging from the black of the booklet itself.
I like the front cover of the top right image as it represents isolation, loss and darkness which are similar to the themes I am wanting to represent in my product.
Abril is a Spanish photographer who heavily focuses on the topics of Sexuality, eating disorders and misogyny.
She has won the photobook of the year award and the Paul Huf award for her work.
Born in Spain, Abril became a journalist until she moved the New York City to study photography. She eventually got a job at Colors magazine where she worked as a staff photographer and consultant photo editor.
In Abril’s book ‘The Epilogue’ she follows the tragic story of a girl who died of bulimia and her family. The majority of the book consists of portraits, archived images / notes and images of specific items and buildings with relevance to the family. However in the very middle of the book there is a hallowing image of the girls scales from her home. This photo brings a lot of emphasis to the scales which is understandable as people who have bulimia often become very obsessed with them. It seems fair to say that the scales are what killed this girl and her obsession with them was severely unhealthy.
I would like to match this technique with my zine and produce an image with direct relevance and effect to the subjects of my other portraits.
Contact Sheet
I am really happy with the outcomes from this shoot. The lighting was really good, I was only in the water for around 20 minutes as the sun was just about to set. I shot everything at f1.8 as the sun was getting low so I wanted as much light getting in as possible. I used a 1/500 shutter because I wanted to get the water sharp.
The top contact sheet is the first selection of the images as I took around 400 pictures. I flagged all the images then went through and unflagged all the photos that were not sharp, not exposed properly, not in focus or badly framed.
The second contact sheet is my favourite images, I stared them from 1 to 3, 1 being good and 3 being the best, ones that I would post on instagram, print or present, I edited them using my own preset as a base then tweaked settings to fit the particular image, I tried to bring out the colours in the water and the sky. The preset that I previously made and used is intended to make the images. look quite cold and moody.
Best Images
Edit Process
I edited this using one of my own presets called Cold Contrast. It adds blue to the shadows making the image feel cold but also adds some yellow to the highlights. I desaturated the blues however to bring the image back to looking realistic. I increased the dynamic range by bringing down the highlights and increasing the shadows. I only very slightly tweaked the whites and blacks as this can ruin some of the image. I added a vignette to bring focus to the person in the image and make it look more moody.
STOP LOOKING AT MY PRIVATE WORK
Shoot Plan
WHERE: The Garage
WHO: I am going to photography my dad prepping my motocross bike.
EQUIPMENT/ LIGHTING: I am going to use my Canon 70d + Sigma 35mm 1.4 lens because I will be fairly up close to my dad which means I need a wider lens but the 35 still gives a nice bokeh and lens compression. I am going to use two lights in this shoot. For thee key light I am going to use a godox sl60w continuous light with a round softbox and a honeycomb grid on it. The grid helps to eliminate light spread and just directs it onto the subject, this light also has a high cri rating and is 5600k which will give a natural high quality light onto the face. My other light is a practical light. I am going to use a tungsten desk lamp to work as an accent light to the key light. It will serve as a back or rim light and make the image look authentic with my dad using it as a light source when working.
COMPOSITION: There will be multiple different angles and different shots of my dad doing different tasks. The main idea is to create a moody shot using the key light to create dark shadows on parts of the face and using the practical light to add texture and depth to the image. I will use the 35mm for every shot and will take some tight shots and some wider shots. For the formal environmental portrait I want to get my dad on one side of the frame with the bike lit on the other side of the frame, with the desk lamp as on accent either on a shelf or on the workbench
Contact sheet
Best Edited Images
Favourite Images
I used the pick (P) and reject (X) tools to separate my images from ones I want to use and ones I don’t, leaving me with 9 photos. I then sorted my usable images with ratings from 3 to 5 stars and either green yellow or red to narrow down my selection.
I place these three images side by side, as they were very similar, to help me with my selection. I picked my favorite and least favorite based mainly on the framing and focus of the images.
I then compared my two favorite images and used the magnification tool to make sure they were both in focus and clear.
I applied my editing to all the photos I had taken and ended up finding a new possible image I hadn’t thought about using before.
The screen shot above on the left shows the grid view of all my outcomes from a small photoshoot of archives photos of my grandparents I took for my photo-zine. After importing them to Lightroom, I then went though all of my photographs one by one on survey view (shown on the right) and flagged them as ‘picked’ if they where good and flagged them as ‘rejected’ if there where not so good.
Then by using the filter option on Lightroom to only show the images I flagged as picked, I zoomed in on each of my images to analyse them. Secondly I rated each photo out of 5 stars on its, focus, exposure, etc. This allowed my to view my photos one by one to make sure they where good quality. In the two images below I colour coordinated the images that where the same, and then set the filter to show what images I set as 5 stars (my best photos)
After setting the filter to a 5 star rating, I saw that there where two red coded images left to choose from. I used the compare tool and zoom tool to see the differences between both and spotted that the image on the right has less shine from the lights from the photo stand. This would be my final image. Finally I took the photos from library to develop and edited them to suit what I wanted.
