Testing High Key Lighting (LO1)

While using a shoot to test a visual concept I also used it to experiment with high key lighting. My aim was to recreate the signature style of Venture Photography, a well know commercial portrait company. I wanted to experiment to see if  I if could produce the same professional look and standard with my two light set up home studio.

To create the look I was aware that I needed to light the background brighter than the subject then expose for them, thereby overexposing the background and getting the white blow out. As I only had two lights I was concerned with getting an even fill behind, as usually in a studio with more lights the approach would be to light equally from both sides, the another light at the front. As I was unable to to this I initially started with the two lights in front of the subjects lighting from either side.

However the issue I had was that the background wasn’t getting enough light because of the drop off in the lighting power. Therefore it was going grey. This can be a nice effect for some portraits but wasn’t the high key image I was aiming for.

The concur this I changed the lighting so I had the soft box lighting the background and the umbrella lighting the subjects. This improved the image but, as I had initially worried about, I wasn’t getting even light on the background which was resulting in directional shadows. I also had the issue that my toy figures were very small and I couldn’t get the studio lights as low as I’d have liked, which meant they were effectively being lit from above.

To resolve this I increased the power of the lights to try and bleach out the shadows and brought in a reflector on the right hand side. This then cause the image to be over exposed and start to loose details.

This was soon fixed by taking a new light meter reading and adjusting my expose settings, finally resulting in the high key images i was looking for. Although the final image still has light drop off on the right hand side, given my equipment I was happy with this end result.

Visual Response to an Academic Journal (LO4)

As part of reflecting on our Applied Methodologies and seeing how it could impact on our Studio Practice work, we were asked to visual interpret a given academic journal. The purpose was to enable us to experiment with how our theoretical work could impact on the atheistic of, and the concepts behind, our photography.  We were also asked to differ from using our usual subjects, therefore as I take portraits I was asked to not use people in my images.

The journal I received was The Instant Camera as a Therapy Tool by Janice Pinchot Woychik and Corrine Bricknell. This discussed the merits of photograph as a therapy tool, and in particular it’s use during the 1980’s in social work to enable staff to record family dynamics.  When the families attend their weekly meetings they were asked to take a family portrait and this was repeated over a period of time.  This then built up an archive of the families interaction with each other, which the social workers or psychologists used to assess the relationships between different members of the family and see if they changed during the given time period.

My interpretation of this was to recreate the family portraits but with a variety of toys to represent the different characters you can get in families. Every family has an oger, someone who’s a bit of a dinosaur, someone who thinks they’re superman etc. I also decided to shoot them in the style of Venture Photography, as I wanted to bring the concept up to date, and that is a very stereotypical style of modern family portraits.

I used two lots of toys, each to differing success. The first group was all action men and figures, which were great to pose as they stood on their own and had moving arms and legs. This enabled me to more accurately recreate the pose and set ups used in modern family portraits. The second group was all soft toys such as dolls and knitted characters. These were not good to use, as they couldn’t hold themselves up so it was hard to get interesting poses. I had to try and prop them up but that didn’t really work, as they wouldn’t hold in a bended position. This resulted in them looking just like a pile of toys, rather then character interacting with each other. I was pleased with the first lot of images as I felt they were successful in their purpose, however I the second images of the dolls was a failure. They looked lifeless and didn’t connote family portraits or the Venture style of photography.

 

As the first experiment was only partly successful I wanted to continue testing, to try different ways to take the images. I decided try using a Polaroid instant camera like the journal specified. I was interesting to see if by sticking closer to the original criteria the images would be more or less successful. . Compositionally I tried to shoot the toys straight on as the families would have, however as I used a Polaroid Land Camera with a rangefinder, initially I had some focusing issues (show in the first picture below). I was also unable to get too close to the toys so the final images are from further away than I would have ideally like. However they did serve the purpose of giving me another perspective. I found that although the images where less technical, the naivety of then seem felt truer to the ones described in the journal.

The conclusion I drawn from this experiment is that it pays to consider how something could be interpreted from every angle and in different way. Although this style of photography and subject matter isn’t something I will continue with as part of this project, it has helped me to consider not always taking a very literal interpretation of information and thinking about if it from a more representational point of view.  I felt the first images were visually and technically stronger, however the Polaroid images were truer to the essence of the journal, therefore both could be considered as successful, just different interpretations.