Work Diary - Shoot 8

Evaluation:

During this shoot there was a lot of prep work resulting in a 20 second shoot.  20 seconds because this was how long my model could hold her breath. I set up the lighting to one side and quite low to cast a few soft shadows in a fairly light room. Got my model to lay down on the floor on a crumpled white sheet and sprayed her with water. Once fairly wet but not so wet that water was running down her face I started to cover the backdrop and her face in talcum powder leaving all but her mouth so she could breath. I fired off a few quick test shots which looked spot on first time so then asked my model to hold her breath while we quickly covered her mouth in talc. This shoot therefor only tok 20 seconds to shoot and about 40 minutes to set up. The camera was set to 1/125 at f4.0 ISO 400. I always shoot in RAW as this gives to the greatest latitude for experimentation later in Lightroom and Photoshop. In the 2 images below the exposure was the same  but by playing with the exposure, contrast, clarity and black and white sliders I was able to get two very different images from the same shoot.

The thing I like about this image is the shadows on the face and the black corners I added in photoshop. This creates a more interesting affect and feel to the photo. What worked well in this image is the contrast between the areas were the light was pointed at and the areas in which there was a shadow caused by camera being directly above the model. At first I thought it would ruin the image but upon taking the image and then proceeding to edit it I discovered it worked very well.

The main thing I like about this image is the fact that the face merges wight the background of the image perfectly allowing it to seem like the head isn't attached to any sort of body and is just there. This makes it very horrific because it means that it is an image of a severed head which people find horrific. This image was inspired by some of Christopher McKenneys images where he removes parts of peoples bodies or has just their head on show.  

Progression:
For my next shoot it will be another shoot inspired by Bob Carlos Clark where we have a model on top of a gravestone. This one will be superimposed so that I don't often anyone by physically having someone sitting on someones grave. I think this will create and interesting image because I have taken the photos of the model on a square block and they look interesting by themselves, so I think that if i were to superimpose them on the plinth it would create an intriguing image.

Here we see a Bob Carlos Clarke image from his book 'The Dark Summer'. In this photo we see that Bob Clarke has put one of his models on top of a gravestone and also had her being naked and only wearing shoes. This creates an interesting image which I would like to try and re-create, but because nudity is a bit of a grey subject I have decided to combine it with the bandage photo below to make it more acceptable for this subject.