I have attended an opening night exhibition by Historian Dr Alec Gill which is focused on a series of photographs he took in the 70s and 80s of the Hessle Road community. The exhibition is entitled “The Hessle Roaders”. Having the opportunity to have a brief chat with Dr Gill I was able to find out that all the photos were taken with a Rolleiflex camera using 120 asa 400 film. (medium format). At the time of taking the images he didn’t see them as anything more that just a record of the times. In 2013 fine art photographer Paul Berriff was impressed by the quality of the images, hence the exhibition. With kind permission of Dr Gill I have included a few mobile phone shots as illustrations. There are some that fall in to the posed and candid categories that are a part of this resit so I will be taking inspiration from them.
The following link goes to the ‘Current Trends in Portrait Photography’ site and I found their content quite stimulating:
http://myportraithub.com/current-trends-in-portrait-photography-world/
There is quite a few examples of candid and creative poses, but one of the pieces of advise it gives is to think about going to a shoot without any pre planed poses to allow creativity to flow. According to this site one of the current trends in vogue is the use of desaturation of the image. This will not necessarily fall in with what I have in mind now but is well worth noting for future shoots.
I have done several shoots to demonstrate the different aspects of this brief and I am using some here for illustration purposes. The images are right out of the camera with post work at this point kept to a bare minimum. The main post work will be on the images I am selecting for printing.
The first shoot was at a city of culture event at Craven Park to celebrate the connected cultures of Hull and Sierra Leone. I was invited by the promoter to take a few shots for the Sierra Leone society in Hull. This was also a good opportunity to take some candid shots. Although these images were primarily for the client, as I was shooting them I had in mind that I may want to use them for my brief and so in my minds eye I was continually framing the images to be cropped for the portraits.
These eleven candid images were taken with my Canon 750D, camera an 18 – 55mm lens, a Neewer NW570 wireless speedlite and the Propac PB 960 speedlite powerpack. This tends to be the go anywhere equipment I keep in my case. For these particular images I did a test shot without flash to ensure I was achieving a complete absence of ambient light.
I used the speedlite both on the camera and off via the flashes inbuilt wireless facility to try and contend with shadows from the speedlites.
Below are the chosen images from this first shoot that I think will work as portraits.
My second shoot was at my mums funeral a few days after shoot one. Primarily, although I was mourning, it nevertheless gave me the opportunity to push the boundaries and move me out of the comfort zone I was used to. I was able to take images at the grave side and also into the open grave to help me break the ice with other relatives and mourners. This was important because funerals are not the first thing one thinks of when doing a shoot, but nevertheless give a photographer a new lead in photography. Researching at the undertakers prior to the funeral I found that more people are open now to a trend of recording an event in someone’s life and even their death. I have included graveside images here because although not portraiture they show the relevance of feeling comfortable at such a time and also when the wake occurred people were then more open to having their photos taken. Again as in the last shoot this was also about an event and therefore I carefully framed my images so that I could later in post, crop some to achieve portraiture. As with the last shoot my equipment list was the same.
The above three image show my attempts at pushing the boundaries and breaking the ice with other mourners.
This shoot lent itself more to posed than candid and below are some of the original images and then the portraiture cropped from them.
I had a third shoot done at home when my son visited and was fitting worktops for us. with this shoot I still used the same camera and lens but used home studio strobes that I have just purchased. The strobes were Neewer 300w strobes and modelling lights, similar to what we would use in the studio at college. The location for the shoot was the kitchen so viable working space in such a small area was very limited so I was limited to one strobe, stand and one 24″ softbox. Here are the best images from this shoot.
Creative
For the creative section of this assignment I did a fourth shoot using my wife as a model. Although I researched creative portraits on the web and in reading matter I couldn’t easily turn myself of from events in my life current at the time of working this part of the assignment.
Because of limited time available I used the kitchen location as used in the last part of the brief. The equipment was exactly the same but with a different position for the light stand and softbox.
I posed my wife near to the window with a soft drink in her hand, supposedly tending some plants on the windowsill. I wanted to give the impression that the time was late evening and the only available light was from outside. For this I placed the Lighting outside facing into the window to simulate ambient light. I took several shots and then selected one of them for the final. I made several copies of the selected image but with different white balances and then blended them together moving each one slightly to give my take on the effect pioneered by John Blakemore. Below are a selection of photographs from the shoot and my final image.
LawriePhoto 