Aim of my final shoots

This shoot is one for this project. In this photoshoot, I will develop my portrait work through images of my mother, the both of us, and a few last self-portraits. Most of these shoots are heavily influenced, compositionally wise, by Hannah Altman’s images of herself and her mother. Latoya Ruby Frazier’s work also helped me to plan these photoshoots, especially her self-portrait work. In my photographs, I want to convey female family relationships, in relation to personal and situational identity (in the home). Using key images for reference in these shoots will help me to direct/carry out the shoot as easily as possible, influencing my compositions, posing and lighting, to create the highest quality outcomes. I’m going to produce single images of my mother, as well as photographs of the both of us, inspired by the images below. After creating images of my mother and I, I am going to create images of my mum and grandmother, and possibly all three of us – I am doing my shoots in this order to make sure my ideas develop in a way that will help the development of my final outcomes. As well as taking portraits, I plan to take a few object images that relate closely to my family identity, as well as photographing more archival images to use in my collages for my book. This is because, in my first photoshoot of archival images, I realised after that I felt that I didn’t have enough images – I often use multiple archive images in one collage and I want to make sure I have more than enough quality material to work with.

Photoshoot 5

Idea	Subject	Settings	Props	Lighting	Genre
Generational identity, mother and daughter relationships, personal identity	My mum, grandmother and I.	Creative Auto, portrait	Camera, Tripod	Natural – window lighting	Portrait, object.

Photoshoot plan

Contact Sheets

At the start of my shoot, I stuggled slightly – I began shooting in my porch, and had trouble with overexposure as the light was coming from behind me. I combatted this by moving my shooting position to the right, and directing my subject to move her head lightly towards me. The lighting then improved, and I think I acheived some of my best images from my shoot in this location.

As the photoshoot progressed, I found it easier to direct my subject, and found adapting to the difficult lighiting in my house easier – I found that as the shoot progressed the quality of the images increased.

Editing

Final Images

I originally edited this in B and W, but decided to turn it back to colour after comparing the two edits with virtual copies in lightroom. I chose to keep this image in colour due to the warm tones which I really like: the brown and blonde in the subject’s hair, in the cushion and in the lamp in thr backgroynd. This creates a flow of leading lines throughout the composition and adds personality to the image – something that black and white can sometimes lack.

This image is one of my favourite edits of my whole project – i edited in black and white in order to emulate the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier, and also to correct over warmth and exposure in the original image (as seen above)

I edited this image with more retro tones – as above, I used colour grading to acheive this, which I developed from previous photoshoots. I edited my image in this way to create a nostalgic mood – this will fit better with my archival images and the tones of those images. This will create more coherent spreads in my book.

I had trouble editing this image – there are high amounts of contrasting tones: the wall and face of my subject are much lighter than the deep black of her jumper. When editing I had trouble keeping the edit subtle and not too contrasted, due to the differing tones in the image. I had to complete multiple edits before deciding on the final one.

Evaluation

Overall I think this shoot produced some really successful outcomes. I shot earlier in the day, learning from my last shoots which were shot too late in the day. I used different locstions to shoot in, such as my porch and also my living room floor, which created some different compositions. I think that my initial framing of photographs when I was shooting could have been improved, as I had to crop most of my images while editing them. Even though I had a few editing issues with differing light and contrast, I think my editing was successful. i’m glad I produced outcomes in colour and monochrome as this means I have a wider variety of outcomes to choose from for my photobook selections and layout.

Photoshoot 6

As well as producing portrait photographs from these shoots, I photographed more archival images from albums at my home – different to the ones I gathered in my last shoots at my grandmother’s house. I didn’t need to alter these images much, just rotating and sometimes turning the exposure up – I shot these in low light, so I did turn the exposure up on a few of the images in the end.

Portrait Images from this shoot

Contact Sheets and evaluation

One of my contact sheets from this shoot – I didn’t struggle with much from this shoot, as I had shot in this location before and was familiar with the lighting. Images in my grandmother’s bedroom were really successful as there was 2 sources of light, creates soft and balanced light in my images. As this shoot was a development from my previous shoots, I created some really successful outcomes – drawing on inspiration from my chosen artists, mistakes from previous shoots and my own new ideas. I edited my images in the same way as pictured above in my previous shoot. I focused on B and W edits only for this shoot.

Final Images