Continuation of Experiments

I decided to have another go at my psychedelic photography, this time using a macro lens. I was really impressed with the results this time around.

More Studio

For my FMP I am exploring the relationship between fashion and music by using a series of projections. I feel that this has been quite an experimental project for me. I used myself as the subject in the studio and projected different videos and pictures onto my face and body.
I had never done anything like this before and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. This has inspired me to carry on experimenting with different kinds of lights, videos and images and I would really like to continue trying new things within my photography.

When editing one or two of these images I did play around with different colours, burn tool, sharpen tool, levels and curves. Doing this is allowing me to understand how to alter specific things properly and not as a whole, for example, using the levels and curves to alter the blacks within the photograph.

Studio

One of my objectives on my PDP was to spend some time in the studio. I had booked it out to do some work for my dissertation and decided that whilst in there that I should have a play around with lighting.
I only go into the studio approximately 4 times a year and the times that I've used it I have used lights that illuminated the whole body rather than just a part of it so I felt that it was important to play around with one or two lights.
I set up one light which was to the right of me. I wanted to light one side of my face and body rather than the whole thing. The only problem I experienced in the studio doing this was that I could not focus my camera automatically because it was too dark so I used the mannequin to focus it, then moved it and took its place.

Guest Speakers - Layla Sailor and Anna White

We had two photographers called Layla Sailor and Anna White come into university and speak to us about their work and their jobs. They both produce very different styles of work, both of which I enjoyed looking at and found very interesting. I felt that it was a bit of a confidence boost for me as I have been worrying a bit about my career after university. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to both of their talks as I took a lot away from it.

Layla told us that she had had some work up on her website that had been there for a while and she was not getting any jobs but as soon as she took it down she started getting job offers. I think that this is something that I will need to bear in mind in the future when publicising my work on a website.
She also told us we should always have a plan b in case the client changes what they want and in case the props or lighting go wrong.

Anna explained to us about her work on projects within the community and how she was able to apply for funding to expand on her work. I really liked her work as it was quite personal and I loved the way that she had arranged the hoarder's belongings in her latest series.

Photoshop

I decided to take my images into Photoshop and have a play around with them as an experiment and a way to improve some of my skills on it. Unfortunately, everything that I said in the previous post has been completely contradicted by this post as I think that the images do not look real any more, especially the third one. I think that that one looks much like one of the 'trippy' cliche images you would find on Google.

Experiments

After the video project I was quite inspired to keep going with that whole idea of psychedelia as it is something I am particularly interested in. I find that when looking at psychedelia as a whole, the representation of it through pictures is quite cheesy and it tends to involve cliche objects and people, i.e. someone on acid, mushrooms, peace signs, swirly bright colours and so on. Most of these pictures are illustrations, gifs or digitally made images and there is never anything photography based.

I don't want to be doing this as I think it's quite unimaginative and boring and I'd like to find something that I can take photos of that is real and psychedelic at the same time.
I had something of a brainwave and decided to capture some images of a very cheap household object. These were taken just using a 18-55mm lens. Although I like them and was quite impressed with the outcome, the image quality wasn't as high as I would have liked but I thought it wasn't bad for my first attempt.