#hnd2b

ENVIROMENTAL PORTRAIT.

For my enviromental portrait I have decided to approach my barber. He owns his own space and it is very quirky and creative. When it opened a year or so ago, I done some work fro him at this point so was very aware of the set up and lighting.

When going into the portrait, I wanted to keep the rustic look but also show a side of him that is a little serious as well as the outgoing character that he is. Here is a shot that was a little more fun, although the scene was a bit messy for my liking.

The final shot was looking more serious and i little less messy with equipment and what not.

Fashion Major Inspiration

MAJOR FASHION FINAL IMAGES & EVALUATION & EDITING

The final five images for the major fashion brief.  I’ve a thing for the trashier end of the 70s and the photography of Newton, Bourdin et al.  I touched on a similar specific period of time for Graded 1 from a slightly different perspective.  This time I had a definite idea that I wanted to present a high fashion look with a trash aesthetic.  I always try to work with a backstory in mind and this helps me focus on getting the look I want.  In this case the backstory was “the girl who didn’t get into Studio 54 and ended up somewhere much seedier”.  I wanted location shots so rented the studio at SWG3 as it’s also a nightclub so allowed me to use the space to its full potential.  The 100 year old lift was a real bonus and I love the composition overall and the twisted mirror inside.  The images start off with a couple of studio shots that, I hope, capture some of that studio glamour of the 70s magazine photography then get progressively trashier, as one does on a night out.  A last minute submission on the off chance led to the images being published in an actual magazine within days which was super!

Editing:  

I used an actual model for the shoot and this was a huge bonus as she knew just how to pose.  I’d prepared a workbook prior to the shoot with makeup and posing and overall theme so this definitely helped get everyone on the same track.  Main issue was the model’s skin was unfortunately pretty bad on the day and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to really fix this in post.  Despondent was the mood.

Techy stuff:  I eased up on the original raw sharpening as skin was going to be an issue.  Skin work was done with a frequency seperation and empty middle layer which I used to even skin tone.  Some additional work done on the high pass layer to remove all the blemishes.  Next, I made a stamped copy of the fsep work, and made an additional three layers with a large gaussian blur of approx 30px (really!).  On the layer above IO applied the image, subtract and 2/128 and then inverted the mask.  Once I’d applied the high pass, I applied a further gaussian of 10px and an inverted layer mask, deleted the underlying low pass layer and this gave me the stamped copy of the fsep work visible then I painted white at 20pc opacity and 5pc flow onto the high pass layer mask to soften the skin texture further.  A bit more on the edit than I’d like but needs must.  It’s a bit more old school than is current but fortunately works with the image.  If I’d been doing something more street it would have been a disaster.

Skin work done I applied the usual Luminosity Curves (3 high, 3 shad, 1 mids) to fine tune contrast, applied a bit of desat, then used a combination of gradient masks and LUTs to colour grade the image as I wanted a colour film sort of feel to the images.  The same Grading was applied to all of the images.  Finally the images were Output Sharpened specifically for inkjet on glossy paper with a resolution set to the printer max capacity and printed on using a profile specifically calibrated to the printer and paper profile.

I took a further series of images during the shoot that I knew I would be editing in a high contrast B&W style and these had all of the same editing steps applied, with the grading being a platinum tone gradient.  These images are much more intimate and reflective while still being very “fashion”.  Oh and I did all the styling myself which I loved.

Retouching exercise with Frequency Separation.

This is the slightly optimised image out of Lightroom.

This is the final image which has gone too far on the processing and retouching. The liquid skin makes the subject look a little surreal and fake. Which is similar to how many fashion like shoots are completed this day and age with the modern image.

I have added some images of research below which highlights the market and how much retouching get done these days on the like of fashion and magazines,

This is a very common thing amongst celebrities and fashion models. The idea of created that perfect face, which is actually impossible in itself as what they are creating is something that no person will be. The fact that they are removing the pores and textures of everything and turning the models in what would seem to be a wax works.

Hyperreal.