NEW BLOG NEW COURSE: PHOTOGRAPHY EXTENDED DIPLOMA

From now on all of my latest college work can be found on this new blog:

mikeaddisoncollege.blogspot.com

Rest in Peace Caisie Muller

This photo is to pay tribute to Caisie who sadly died in a car crash this month, although I didn’t know her as well as others from the class I did spend some time chatting, helping her with photoshop and brainstorming crazy ideas for our college work! Over that time I learnt that she was a lovely, sweet girl and I know she will be missed by many.

Exhibition Hanging Timelapse

Photos from the 'Field Trip'

So here are some of the photos I took on the recent college field trip, they're not all up on flickr yet some more will appear as I upload!

Audio Visual: "Stereotype Me." video

You might recognise these images from the "Stereotype me." portraiture project that's also on this blog, just thought I'd share the video version with you!

The Photographer's Story

Just a quick post to share a piece of my work that I forgot to publish here a while ago!

This was achieved by positioning a desklamp on a table and pointing it directly at the background you can see here, that shadow is actually me!

To do this I set my older camera up on a tripod and I used the 5 second self timer function, this gave me just enough time to get into position so it was very useful!


These were four seperate images that I have combined into one through using photoshop.


Told you this post was quick!

Stereotype Me.

 Above: "Stereotype Me." final image.

The assignment was to create three portraits that have some connection to stereotypes and right from the start I sort of had an idea planned out in my head (which I will tell you more about later on.)

After 'mind mapping' and doing research on other photographers I got on with planning the three shoots, would I work in the studio or on location, who is going to be in my images? what equipement will I need? That sort of thing!

So in the end I chose Charlotte to be the model in my photographs because she fits in nicely with my idea (which I will get on to telling you about in a bit!)  

But first I'm going to talk a little bit about the shoots:

In the end there were two actual shoots and one mini shoot. To take these photographs I used my trusty DSLR camera with a range of different lenses and the Speedlite Flashgun.



Shoot 1: "The Chav Shoot"



So here's my photo to represent the first shoot, the model is Charlotte (as you already know) and the dog is Tia. As you can tell the shoot has been carried out on location, just outside my house actually!
 
Here's a list of additional equipment/tools I used to complete this shoot:

• Meaty chunks - as a reward to keep Tia focused!

 If you were wondering I used fill in flash for the image above, in my opinion the fill flash in daylight looks more like something you would expect to find in an arts magazine (or just a regular magazine) instead of some work like this, although it does work this time around!

As a whole the shoot went very well (there can't have been any disasters as I'd remember them now if there were!)


Shoot Two: The "Goth" Shoot



This shoot was planned to have taken place on location but the weather decided otherwise so I set up a simple 'home studio' and that's where all of the images were taken.

My 'home studio' consisted of a large white sheet hung up for a background, a desklamp and my camera with the speedlite flash attached. Charlotte did her own makeup for this shoot and the knife was the only prop.

As always the majority of poses and shot angles were improvised on location (although I had a vague idea of what I was looking for beforehand.)


The Third Image

























 For my last image I decided to do something a little different, I decided to re-create a portrait that I had already taken of Charlotte, a year before I think it was.

My final image would've looked even more like the image I was re-creating if I actually remembered to take a copy of the original photo with me!!

I decided to change the lighting a bit too, instead of direct lighting (in the older image) I decided to bounce the flash off of a wall behind me (this did leave a colour cast but it's nothing a bit of photoshop won't fix) this resulted in an image with an even exposure that didn't reveal too many shadows.

Which leads me on to the final part of this post my idea:

The Idea

The idea behind my project is to force the viewer into stereotyping the character that they see in each image, the character in the image on the left should be easily recognised as a "chav" and in the right side image a "goth" or "emo"  in the centre however it should be harder to stereotype as that is the model being herself.

I chose to portray Charlotte as a "Chav" and a "Goth" because these were the two main categories I remember teenagers trying to fit into back when I was at school. I remember thinking to myself on many occasions 'why can't we just be that person in the middle? the person that is truly us.' 


By the viewer recognising this it should make them challenge (or at least think about) how they look at and perceive others because of the way they dress or by a particular attitude that they have at that moment therefore provoking thought on why we stereotype others and how stereotyping affects us as a person.

If you would like to see more of my photos from this project please click here to be taken to the "Stereotype Me." page on my website.

Book Cover Project

Here is my final book cover, I think it looks alright! The project brief stated that the images must include a person so I decided to take some portrait shots against a plain background, as this gave me loads of space to play around with text in the editing stages.

I decided to make my book cover about mental health because it is a topic that I am familiar with as I grew up with members of my own family suffering with different mental health issues.


Shooting
All of the images were taken against a white sheet using my Canon 1000D, on manual mode and set to the highest quality Jpeg file size. I also used a YN-460 external flash, which was located on top of the camera.  
I shot these photos in colour as this is what I do with all of my work, I do this because it gives me more options: to keep the images in colour, convert them to black and white or convert them to black and white but preserve some colour / colours.


Editing
I used the Adobe Photoshop CS2 software to edit my images and to produce the final book cover (seen above.)
Before creating the final book cover I prepared each image individually I did this because once everything is placed onto one canvas (that’s Photoshop language for a page) it’s hard to edit an individual image properly without changing the rest of the document too, plus this way I could ensure that each image was just right by checking the histogram after applying new adjustment layers.


Front Cover Image

As you can see I have edited this image the most, one of the most noticeable edits is that I have removed his eyes, I achieved this by using the clone tool to copy skin areas of the photo over the top of his eyes, I then used the healing brush around the edges to blend the cloned areas with the original skin areas. I finished off by using the blur tool to slightly blur the whole area that I had just worked on as this gave the photo a more natural look to it.

Back Cover Image


For this image I only really adjusted the curves (this tool is a more precise way of adjusting the contrast of an image) I also converted the image to black and white by using the Channel Mixer adjustment.
I knew that I would have to have consistent images for my idea so I copied the adjustments above onto the front cover image too.







Once I had saved these images I was ready to put my book cover together.

I opened a new canvas at A4 size, then placed both images onto it and positioned them.

I then had to choose which font I would use, come up with a book title and think about what I wanted to write for the blurb on the back (so all of the writing is my own too!)

I decided to use my own logo instead of a proper publishers as I wanted every part of the book to be my own and all of it was apart from the barcode.

With everything in place and all text at the right size, in an appropriate font all I had to do was save my work, I saved in both Jpeg and PSD formats, Jpeg for easy viewing on almost all computers and PSD just in case I ever wanted to go back and make further changes.


A few tips:

If you have the option to use rulers or guidelines on your editing software use them as you don’t realise how useful they are until you start!

Save regularly and make back ups to an external source (like a memory stick) as ALL computers (PC or MAC) can crash and you’ll end up having to start again.

“Attention is in the detail”

All images in this post are © Mike Addison 2011