feanorsbeanie

[feanorsbeanie]

Finals: My final three images did not turn out how I imagined then to at the beginning of this project, but I am happy with the way they turned out. My partner Ruth modelled for me and acted as my reoccurring subject that was required by the brief. As the brief also stated, all three images must convey a different mood, and at least one of them must use artificial lighting. Although this was difficult under Covid Alert Level three and four, I found some creative solutions to my lack of resources. Each mood conveyed through the images is related to feelings discussed in my flat about the lockdown.The first image is created from a background image taken late at night at the intersection near my apartment. It is edited in CameraRaw and photoshop to match the deep neon pink of the original image of Ruth. Said image was taken outside a bubble tea store further down the street. It’s extremely bright neon sign was a fantastic source of artificial light to highlight Ruth’s face in the darkness. The overwhelming pink colouration helps represent my first mood. With lots of university work to do, motivation has fallen. Pink usually represents calm and love, but the darkness of the image and the full overwhelming colour shows different. In this case the pink represents a feeling of passiveness and weakness. The intense highlights and sheer volume of one colour represents how overwhelmed we have felt with the new surge of the virus and how helpless we have been feeling because of it.The second image was fun to create. The background is an old incandescent streetlamp shining through a huge woody maple tree. A photo of Ruth that was captured in my room with the only light source being a torch shining through a bottle of rum, overlays the tree in a ghost-like fashion. This image represents a dissociative mood, which has been very prominent for me over the course of the lockdown. The branches of the tree are representative of neurons in our brain, as dissociation is a mental state. The semi-transparent apparition or Ruth overlayed shows how when in a dissociative mood you exist almost in two places at once: the physical space you occupy, and the mental space that your mind retreats to. It’s luminous incandescent orange colour is dreamy and calm, yet as a whole image creates an eerie feeling with its dark shadows.The final image is one of hope, differing from the previous two. The background image is a close-up picture of a daisy I took in the field near my apartment. I edited Ruth into the image at a small scale looking up at the daisy. It gives a sense of hope through greenery and nature symbolising healing and growth. Not only this, but the scale represents the seemingly huge road ahead and the struggles yet to come. The bright and colourful naturistic image is the counter to this, showing Ruth looking up, ready to make the journey forward. I feel throughout this lockdown hope has been lacking, but I am glad I opted to convey a more positive mood through this image instead of a third negative one. It rounds off the set nicely.

REFERENCES FOR INSPIRATIONS MENTIONED IN MY BLOG:

 Flickr. “Tristan Petel.” Accessed October 21, 2021. https://www.flickr.com/people/trxstan/.“Untitled,” n.d.

William Dark Photography. “William Dark Photography.” Accessed October 20, 2021. //www.williamdark.com/.

Vantuyl, Linda (@lindavantuyl). Instagram post. October 4th, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/lindavantuyl/

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 10

There was one last thing I wanted to do before moving to primarily working in photoshop, and that was explore some more of the artificial lighting options I had out and about. A main one I wanted to try was the bubble tea place right next to my apartment that shines painfully bright neon pink light directly into my window until 12AM every day. We went for a night walk around my street and tried to use the light from the sign to highlight Ruth’s face in an interesting way. There were also other streetlights, lamps and signs that I experimented with. The roads were completely dead, so I took some low, dark shots of the intersection near my apartment which I could use as a background. We also found a cat friend hanging out under a tree.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 9

It is getting close to when I need to start creating my final images, so I’ll probably stop taking heaps of photos soon or I’m going to have trouble sifting through them all. This was just a little walk we had at the lake where I took my camera.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 8

Today was incredibly sunny and bright, which made for some interesting images. I took some pictures of the roof of the mall; I thought I could use it as a point to edit my model jumping off from my earlier reel, but the angle was a bit difficult. I will see if I can manage it when it comes to editing. The clear sky and bright sun created some weird looking lighting on the path through the Albany Domain, everything looked really fake and seemed to not have any shadows. It felt similar to the floodlight that night at the lake, except not artificial. It could be used as a background for a surreal image, I will experiment further with editing.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 7

This time when we went out, I brought my macro lens so that I could start experimenting with taking photos of flowers and other stuff. I had used my macro before, but not much. I quickly discovered that there aren’t a whole lot of flowers around my apartment, so that was annoying. Today was particularly windy, so that made it extra difficult. Daisies and clovers had to do, but with them swaying around in the wind and being so close to the ground it took me ages to get some decently focused pictures. We found a four-leaved clover so that was cool to try and capture. Hopefully some of these will be useable for my project.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 6

The busted light from the previous night walk gave me an idea. As I have limited options for artificial light at my tiny apartment, I could use artificial light that I can find outside, like this floodlight at the lake. It looks weird, almost surreal just by itself. It may have been because I was tired and wasn’t using my camera properly, but the grass looks almost fake, and Ruth looks like she could have been photoshopped in. There are many other lights around that would likely be better than this one, so we will go exploring and utilise them. This was an interesting exercise though, and opened up my project a bit more.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 5

Sidetracking slightly, we went for a night walk to the lake near my apartment. I brought my camera hoping to capture some images that could be used as backgrounds in my work, or useful in some other way. The water on the lake was very pretty and haunting in a way. We came across a broken streetlight that was buzzing and flickering. I took way too many photos of it.

[feanorsbeanie]

Photographer Inspiration/Research 3: Linda Vantuyl

Continuing on from my previous inspiration, a person I follow on Instagram, Linda Vantuyl, has sparked my imagination further. She is a macro nature photographer and captures stunning photos of flowers and insects. I love her photos, I find them so interesting to look at, and they are beautifully edited. Her images inspired an idea to have the background of my hopeful image as a macro piece. I could use my macro lens to capture a flower or leaf, and photoshop my model onto it. To me this could symbolise hope through nature, colour, saturation and temperature of the editing, while also implying how big of a task and how big of an impact the last few years have had on us all. I really like this idea and I plan to shoot some photos in macro soon.

Vantuyl, Linda (@lindavantuyl). Instagram post. October 4th, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/lindavantuyl/

[feanorsbeanie]

Photographer Inspiration/Research 2: William Dark

A second photographer I came across is William Dark who does some amazing landscape and nature photography. Scrolling through his collection made me feel incredibly happy and calm. I love the idea of my content/hopeful image in a soft background in nature. It really contrasts with having to be trapped inside most of the time. I love the subtle composition of his photos, and particularly the warm, bright, colourful feeling captured in all of his work.

William Dark Photography. “William Dark Photography.” Accessed October 20, 2021. //www.williamdark.com/.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 4

This set of images was taken on a walk slightly later than the last one, at dusk. The lighting was beautiful, and I love some of these shots. I am considering having the three moods for my final images to be a hopeful mood sandwiched between two negative ones. The first being dissociation, the second hope/content, and the final a deep upset. With some final pieces of research, inspiration, and experimentation, I feel I will be ready to start manipulating my images and attempting to capture these feelings through my lens and editing.

[feanorsbeanie]

Photographer Inspiration/Research 1: Tristan Petel

I stumbled across Tristan while scrolling my Pinterest and was intrigued. I followed the link trail to his Flickr account and found his entire collection. All of his work is incredibly interesting. I note that a lot of his work is very prop heavy which I don’t have a lot of access to at this time. His photos tend to be quite dark, cold and desaturated, or entirely in black and white. His images are very raw and he shows exactly what he wants to, with nothing held back. I love the way he intertwines nature with a lot of his images and would like to do something similar for one of mine. The overall dark and cold editing is something that resonates with me very much and I will be taking inspiration from his style.

Reference:

Flickr. “Tristan Petel.” Accessed October 20, 2021. https://www.flickr.com/people/trxstan/.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 3

Jumping back to my research into dissociative colour and light, I attempted to use what I had lying around at home to create some interesting lighting effects. This proved to be way more difficult than I imagined. In class we had been informed of some ways that we could create diffusers and use lights and lamps that can be bought online. The problem here was that I have a salt lamp, and ceiling light, and a really garbage torch, with literally twelve cents in my bank account and no option to buy anything useful. So, as the brief requires us to use artificial lighting, I felt kinda worried. None the less, I experimented with my torch and shining it through a few glass bottle we had with dark rum and pink gin to try and create some interesting lighting effects. I thought it was a cool idea, but the power of the torch wasn’t enough, and it was very difficult to try position it, hold it in place, hold and focus the camera, and take a picture all at once. I might chuck some of these images into CameraRAW and see if I can edit them and distort them to make something cool, but as they are they are pretty useless and I didn’t like them. I would have to come up with some other way of using artificial lighting to fill the brief, even it it’s just light from the room light.

[feanorsbeanie]

Reel 2

We went for another walk with my camera at about 5pm and took some more random shots. I had some fun with this one with people walking along the path and having to mask up and move out of the way every few minutes. I was also thinking about how I wanted to compose my final images and what pose I needed to create them. Her and I bounced ideas around, and I came up with photoshopping her into a background where she jumps off something like a building, or is floating/falling. I will explore this further with research, but it was fun and felt good to be silly with all that’s going on.

[feanorsbeanie]

When thinking about dissociation, I couldn’t help but think of the music video for “Pigeon” by one of my favourite artists, Cavetown. The song and video are about dissociation, and although it is not still imagery, screencaps of the video have given me insight into further representation of dissociation. It is clear that this mood is represented by surrealism, and I agree with this from my own experiences. The main take away from this is once again distortions through stretching and blurring, but also the colour and saturation. The colours are bright and plentiful, but have been desaturated to be dull. It is as if the original unedited shot would be bright, over-exposed and colourful, but in post some of these aspects have been dulled while others have stayed the same or been intensified.

[feanorsbeanie]

Research 1 - Mood Lighting

The first mood / feeling I wanted to capture was the act of dissociating. I tend to dissociate for extended periods of time when trying to focus on something or when I can’t get out and explore. To me, this feeling is quite bright and surreal. Starting my research further cements this for me. Although a lot of the images I came across had no saturation or hue and were in black and white, it was still clear to me that the lighting in these images is intentionally harsh. They tend to have very bright highlights, and dark shadows. They also have a very surreal feeling to them created by heavy editing, or distortions of light created through camera techniques. I can consider using a higher ISO or a slower shutter speed to create these effects with bright lights. I can also up the highlights to an extreme to create this surreal and traditionally ‘wrong’ lighting .

[feanorsbeanie]

I took 3 of my favourite images from the first reel I shot and edited them in lightroom just to get me back into the swing of photo editing. I am really happy with these images.

[feanorsbeanie]

First Reel

After brainstorming some feelings, my partner, Ruth, and I went out for an evening lockdown walk through the park next to my apartment. I brought my camera and captured some images to get back into being behind the camera. I’m really happy with how these quick snaps turned out, and they are already starting to capture the moods I wish to display. With editing, research, and experimentation, they will be even better.