People and Place: Assignment 5, Shoot 1

The Brief

To produce a portfolio of images of writers and artists in their natural habitat for use in magazine/newspaper articles on the creative people of Shropshire.  By ‘natural habitat’ I mean the places where they work, or find inspiration, or which express aspects of themselves and their lives.  The locations and times are to be agreed between model and photographer.

A by-product of this will be to provide the writers and artists with images they may use in their own publicity material.

The Photographs

Selected images will be posted on my learning log online and a smaller number of selected prints will be forwarded to the OCA for evaluation.  Each participant may if they wish receive prints and .jpg files of themselves.

Shoot 1: Sue, writer, 23/01/2014

Kit
18-55 mm lens, reflector.  I took my studio flash outfit but didn't take it out of the car.  It's bulky and would have dominated everything aand inhibited movement.  The reflecor was useful, though white-painted doors worked too.
Assistant
Suki was very useful, because she could talk to the model and also hold the reflector while I tok photographs.  Talking and relating to the model is one of my weaknesses and I was glad of her presence.

Technical

800 ISO; f5.6-7.1, 1/50.  Where there was a big lighting contrast I used manual rather than my usual aperture priority.  In future I'd hope to stop action shots with 6400 ISO or flash.  I took 99 photographs, some of which were for exposure testing.

Images

I was excited at seeing Tony Ray-Jones's contact sheets so I decided to run off my own.  It's a failing of digital photography that there are normally no contact sheets to provide clues to the photographer's thinking.  Photoshop can produce these without needing to have the images converted from RAW first.  Advantages for me are that I can review pictures in print and in my armchair; I can record my thoughts and decisions, and review them later on.  It enables me to capture some of the learning I'm doing.

Location

Sue has a lovely spacious house with a large lawned garden, so there were several locations to choose from.  However I was captivated by the office and most of the images are from there.  There's a large desk with a lovely green leather chair. These items impressed me so much that I rather disregarded Sue's actual workstation: a table behind the door, with a steel and plastic swivel chair. This is more of an administrative workstation than a writer's desk.

Poses

In the office, in the green leather chair, using the reflector to light her face. There was a bookcase in the corner of the room and I was able to get shots with this in the background.

The large desk on the right obtrudes; it wouldn't have been a great hardship for me to step half a pace to the left!

 

This is the one she chose. The presence of the books emphasises that she's a writer.

 

It's very similar to this, which I think is more active but harder, especially in monochrome.

We then moved across the office to her workstation.

The sun was moving round and caught the edge of her face.  If this had occurred to me earlier I'd have taken these shots first, before it got round so far.

We moved her office chair in front of the big green one and turned her round, so that the sun coming in through the high window behind her cast a halo on her hair.

It's a pleasant image, the halo effect on the hair is attractive.

I prefer this, but in colour, the background's a bit busy.

It's less cluttered, and stronger, in monochrome.

I removed the distracting bright lines on top of the radiator.  I think this is my favourite.

We moved to the dining room. This gives onto the garden through French windows, and is where she keeps her musical instruments, including a large pair of bongoes. 

I fell between two stools here. When she played the bongoes there was movement blur and when I asked her to keep still, the spontaneity leaked away and the pictures looked posed. In future, I'd use my biggest ISO or fill-in flash to stop the movement rather than make the model do it.

The garden background tended to overexposure, but I got super modelling on her face, again with the reflector. This was propped up below her while my assistant talked to her.


In general I was able to capture views where the model was not obviously aware of the camera and was animated and well modelled. A couple of to-camera shots. I tried for variety; when using books or garden as part of the picture I felt the figure was too small. Again, I'd ask her to read a book or use her laptop, to get the face illumined from a logical source.