Ceasers Camp Contact Sheet

I tried to focus on the natural idiosyncrasies within the area. Things that are unique to the day and to the specific landscape itself. The ice in the water shows it was winter for example. The low sun shows it was around 3pm. The tyre tracks show recent human activity. The lack of human interaction in the photographs shows the mostly emptiness of the space on this cold January afternoon.

Emily's Photoshoot

Each dress and outfit hold a personal connect for her, some clothes are given to her by family members and others hold memories.

She looks like a painting here, the face position and her special hair band combined with her deep black dress give this effect. It was a challenge to light this as her dress really sucked in light, it was hardly reflective at all like felt. I used a large soft box to get soft shadows across her face and shot it as a soft Rembrandt.

I like this shot it looks so natural, she looks calm and relaxed, and her hair flows nicely. We considered using a wind fan, but could not get hold of one on the day.

Here I went really in depth when retouching, as always I sorted out the white balance, tone curves, contrast and highlights/shadows and white/black levels. I then used an action I made in photoshop that pulls a crazy amount of detail out of photographs.I used this effect especially for the cardigan as it has this wonderful texture that was just begging for me to sharpen it.

I chose to frame Emily on the right hand side to add tension to the image. Her body position is partially pointing to the right of the image, so I felt framing it like this made it seem she was moving away from the dark left area of the frame.

This was actually I test shot I took just after adjusting the lighting and she was just moving her top, but it captures her natural strong character so well and for her brief on Self-Identity it had to be one of the final images.

I used a half second shutter for this picture which gave it this gold movement effect. Her smile is stunning and where her arms are look perfect. When retouching I made sure to retain the Gold colouring and I pulled more colour out of the RAW file. The gold reflects Emily's sunny happy disposition in contrast to the first dark photographs where she is remembering. 

Additional Photoshoot - Emily

Emily contacted me about her University application, she has to do a project based on her own identity. She wanted to show a range of styles that say something about her.
We started by goofing around and joking while getting the lighting right, this was a good way tto break the ice and the more we got into it, the easier and more productive it became

Contact Sheet:

The Photoshoot

Contact Sheets

I used a Nikon d800, so I had tons of resolution to play with, to crop and get in depth in Photoshop if I needed to. I used an 85mm lens as this was the longest telephoto lens that I could use in the studio while still retaining a whole body photo. I like to use telephoto lenses as they pull things close together and compress the image so peoples faces look natural. I also used a 24-70mm lens, partially for its versatility, mainly so I could shoot on 24mm and get weird wide effects on each photograph where things are pushed even further away from the lens than seems natural. I thought this effect worked well as the garments and the concepts behind them are insects. 

I primarily used a large softbox to light each photograph. The soft box was above the model. We used a grey background to fit with the dark nature of the photographs. I also changed to a white backdrop to make the colourful vibrant orange top to really stand up out of the screen. Beneath the models feet out of shot i had a large white board to reflect some light back into the model to further soften shadows, I did this because shooting on a dark background naturally lends itself to very dark contrasty images and I wanted to break away from this a little. I also tried using a Ring Flash. This created a nice effect for the photographs with longer exposures of 1-3 seconds. This forced me to have the camera in a stable spot and also lit the photograph across the frame more, you can notice lots of light fall off on the photographs shot with the large softbox.