While my main interest is in alternative fashion I have been trying not to pigeon hole myself into one specific genre or style so this semester has been about developing a range of technical skills. I have tried to use a range of lighting from high key to dynamic and use hard light and soft and combination in between. The main high point for me was my tuition day with Julian Kilsby and that has had a big effect on how I approach my photography and lighting setups. I have been trying to put my new skills into practice and I feel I have partially achieved that. I still need to make a few tweaks to my backlighting but I am quite confident that I could effectively light any studio shoot that I could be called on to work on.
The steampunk and fashion/beauty shoot with Natalie has produced some of my favourite work from this year as I feel that I was closer to 'getting everything right' on that shoot than any other. This was more of a themed shoot and could work as part of an editorial spread. I was also very happy with my post-production work on these images and feel as though buying the Gry Garness DVD and book has really been a good investment.
The shoot with Cervena Fox was an exciting project and I got the chance to work with an established alternative model. I am really pleased with the images from this shoot but I feel that I could have produced even better images if I was more familiar with the Phase One Camera. In addition, I did have some issues on the run up to the shoot - breaking both cameras and then having to use the MK II tethered with did put me off my game a little. However, the shoot went really well and the model was great to work with as I just said what I was looking for and she did all the hard work for me. Another challenge was using the Capture One software, which although 'industry standard' was seriously slow when compared to Adobe's own Camera Raw in CS4 or Lightroom and I had to factor in extra time to process the RAW files and convert them to Tiffs for further Photoshop work and retouching.
The Demarchellier-inspired shoot was a bot of a challenge as the model let me know what she was looking to achieve and I needed to interpret that and come up with images that would be suitable for her portfolio. The hard/soft light techniques from my workshop worked really well for this shoot and I feel that we produced some very effective images. In addition, our images were not just straight copies of our inspiration images.
The shoot for Stacie ('Nona Nitemare') was quite interesting as it was all high key stuff but most of the images would be cut out from the background and be used and navigation and background images on her website. We produced a good selection of images and the client was happy so that was a success.
Mikey's shoot produced another successful outcome and a happy client.
Overall, it has been a very challenging semester but I feel has though my photography has developed well and I am now happy with my level of technical skills. Next semester will be about developing my ideas and producing more editorial style work and putting together a series of images for my projects. This will be a new challenge as I have not done much editorial style work so I will have to plan carefully in order to get a flowing sequence of images that can stand-alone or be used as a series to tell a story.
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