Negotiated study 2nd Shoot

Here's an image from my second shoot for my final negotiated study images.

I feel like I'm getting a much better handle on this series now and am working with a provisional title of "Tethered", as the running motif of the series is that each subject will be attached to something with reference to the subject or everyday life, hopefully in a more ambiguous nature.

My good friend Andy was really up for this shoot which I was quite happy about as he has quite a distinctive look and a lot of hair. I decided to use hair as the motif for the image and shot him in a hairy gorilla suit and as you can see is tethered to a hair dryer. I also had him sit on some tires, and there was a couple of reasons for this. Firstly Andy is quite tall and so logistically it would have been quite difficult to position him in the shot without seeing the top of my backdrop. I also felt that it would be a nice way of changing composition within the series so that it doesn't become too similar, and also as Apes and Monkeys sit on tires in the zoo, and we are all only shaved apes after all.

The shoot itself was really good and felt very collaborative with Andy suggesting different poses to try for the image. I also shot with my camera tethered to my laptop through Lightroom, so the images would show on the screen as I shot them which would mean that I could see them in more detail than on the back of my camera. This also meant that Andy could see the shots and helped me explain more about what I liked and didn't like about his poses.

The shoots are getting easier to set up as I am generally using the same lighting configuration for the shots and the backdrop and composition is an homage to the portrait work of Irving Penn (see below).

Recent work

Here's a few images from recent shoots I've been doing.

The first three are from a shoot I did for stylists at George's hair salon for competitions they were entering. I'm quite happy to say that the third shot has been selected to go through to the final.

I've really begun to enjoy doing this kind of work and is certainly an area where I am slowly but surely building up a network of contacts. Also the majority of the work is coming from word of mouth as people are recommending me, which is always good.

I shot these using a 50mm prime lens and a pair of Bowens heads. One was fitted with a large softbox for a nice spread of light and the other was fitted with a honeycomb grid that I used as a key light for the hair.

On reflection I think that when I do this kind of work again I will use a smaller aperture and also shoot with a longer focus of around 100mil or above to get more detail in to the shots.

This next shot is from a collaboration with Lara Giffard who is a make up student I have begun to work with quite a lot. It's based on the idea of Candy and is heavily influenced by the recent Victorias Secrets Autumn/ Winter catwalk show.

The venue for the shoot was the Americandi store in the High Cross, and had to be arranged out of trading hours. The shoot was an interesting one to say the least as we only had 40 minutes on site and so had to be pretty quick about turning shots around.

I decided to try and light the shoot with just one Bowens head and a reflective brolly as it would save me more time to turn shots around. Although it was quite a high intensity shoot I'm quite happy with the results I got and feel that this one is by far the stand out shot.