Fashion Brief

As part of a project we had to organise a fashion editorial project. We were put into groups and then given theme of the clothing brand Diesel and the magazine Exit.

We decided to look at Diesel and soon found out they were having a re-branding of themselves called Diesel Reboot. We tried taking the styles from their new more artsy and grungy line.

We found a car park which was in the site of a demolished mill, some of the walls were still up so were covered in graffiti, we did a shoot there in the dark but had lots of technical issues with the camera and lights. We went back again this time in the day and shot some really nice images.

From here we went on to edit the images to make them appear darker and grungy. In the end I was really happy with how the images turned out. You can see some of our images bellow. We then turned these images into an online zine which can be viewed here, fashion brief.

In all honesty I am not happy with the final zine, this is because the creating of it was out of my control. The first image in my opinion was ruined by cropping half of him off. I also did not approve of the small sized images I felt that the whole zine should have been full bleed as I felt this was really effective on the first two images. I did really like the placing of the final image.

Twelve Words

Today I was given a one day brief, it involved all of us saying an adjective. Once all of us had said one we were told we needed to do a mini project surrounding these words. Taking a twelve photo’s to represent twelve of these words:

Wrinkly

Wet     

Special 

Dry        

Bold      

Geometric         

Lovely  

High      

Tall        

Smokey               

Transparent      

Smooth               

Grim     

Split      

Fresh    

Extreme              

Crooked              

Sparkling             

Damaged            

Dirty     

Narrow

Helpful

Stupid  

Shiny    

Dark      

Drab                                            

Colourful   

         

My photos are below, I found it a very nice brief because we got to walk round taking photos on a lovely sunny day. I managed to cope with the time well and was fairly happy with my images. I then was asked to turn these images into a zine which can be seen here:Twelve Words 

Colourful

Transparent

Geometric

Lovely

Bold

Tall

Dark

Narrow

Split

Dry

Drab

Drab

Tom Staddard

Tom Stoddard is an English documentary photographer. We went to visit his exhibition at the White Cloth gallery in Leeds. His photos cover events in places such as South Africa, New York, Sudan, India and China. I found his images really powerful and thought provoking. Themes of death, famine and war are apparent in most images.

The gallery was set out really well with quite a lot of negative space around the images leaving room for thought. The pictures were smallish in size but this meant you had to get up close to them meaning you had to concentrate on each image. I also really like the lighting in the gallery, it was lit rather dimly but the pictures were still viewable because of some wall lights. This lighting really added to the sombre mood of the exhibition.

In the end I found it to be a fantastic exhibition and it is definitely worth going and taking a look at Tom Stoddard’s work as its definitely one of my favorite exhibitions of this year.

Saturday Girls

Originally from Delaware in the USA photographer, researcher and Senior Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University Casey Orr has created an exhibition entitled Saturday Girls.

The exhibition is about a project of Casey Orr which involved talking pictures of girls in Leeds with unusual hairstyles. The girls are all young.

The prints were rather large and for me they felt a little too large often with some of the images losing their quality. The photos were a mixture of flattering and not. However I did quite like this as it felt like a comment on today’s girls trying to use makeup to make them look more attractive when at times it made them look worse.

The main theme of the project is hair and there were some really fun ones. It was definitely interesting looking at them and a couple of these images were really nice such as this one below.

On a whole I think this is definitely worth a visit or a quick look on the internet. Personally not my favorite exhibition I've visited this year.

Saturday Girls

Chen Man Gallery

Chen Man born 1980 is a Chinese fashion photographer who has produced numerous covers for Chinese and international fashion magazines and today I got the chance to see some of her work in a gallery space.

As I walked through the doors I was greeted by a small introduction and a picture and I could immediately tell it wasn’t my cup of tea. With its large, colourful and highly edited pictures the gallery didn’t so much impress me as disappoint. Colourful photo shopped, space women themes ran throughout. With these strong colours and even stronger use of editing software came an even greater feeling of despair as I tried to find some merit with in the images as to why they be showcased.

Simultaneously exhibiting these images at the same time as China pushes towards its first lunar mission can’t be a coincidence. It feels these images are very pro China and perhaps she has been backed to such an extent to do such images subliminally boosting the Chinese space program and ultimately being used as propaganda.

Yes I have just slated this exhibition but there are a couple of things I liked. For me the scale and detail of the images were fantastic, some pictures taking up most of a wall. The crystal clear clarity helped push out the vibrant colours contained within her photography. This added a definite exciting and exuberant feeling to her images.

I really don’t mean to knock Man's images so badly but like I’ve said before it just wasn’t my cup of tea. If you like big and bold fashion imagery then you will be in your element looking at Man’s work.

Lighting Ratios

I have learnt a lot recently from studio practice sessions about lighting, portrait lighting mainly. I've learnt about some of the styles of lighting and their uses, also about some of the technical aspects of lighting using key (the main light) and fill (secondary lights or reflectors) lights. Lighting ratios are the difference between the key and the fill lights. You can find out this ratio by using a light meter to measure the aperture value needed at the dark and the light areas, the number of stops difference is then converted into a ratio, so if there's only one stop difference it is 2:1 lighting ratio if their is two stops difference it is a 4:1 lighting ratio.This is because of the fact the light is either halved or doubled coming into the lens (see my post on aperture).

2:1 Ratio using Low Key Lighting.

1:1 Ratio using mid key lighting.


I have found this information I have learnt really useful and will be using it when I delve more into studio portrait photography.

One Day Brief

Today I was given a 'one day brief...' Well technically it was more like 9:45 till the 2:30 deadline. At the brief we were all given a fifty word story chosen at random, here is my story:

Her eyes flickered open, and she smiled warmly.

“Morning!”

“Morning,” I replied, pulling her closer.

“Sleep well?”

“Very.”

“Want something to eat?”

“No thanks.”

“A drink?”

I shook my head.

She was silent for a while, then said,

“I’m Jill by the way..”

“Mark.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

At first this story really confused me as to what images I could produce from the passage. I first thought about trying to find a bed and snapping some images there but that idea didn't seem really feasible. I then thought about taking really macro images of someone's face but to me that didn't, although it followed the story, seem very imaginative or creative and I wanted my images to be more of a journey or even a story rather than simply four images. So this led me to my third and final idea, to in a way carry the story on through my own visual interpretation. So here are the four images entitled 'The Morning After The Night Before'. 

These images tell the blurry tale of our characters journey to work the next day. Still slightly intoxicated from a night of drink and excess, these images show his journey from home to the train station. 

I really enjoyed this project, although challenging it let me get really creative in a short period of time. However the amount of time we had to do this project for me was perfect, I had ample time to submit them and have a nice break after! Looking back at this project I don't think I would have done much differently, In the future I'm looking forward to doing more one day briefs.