Disposables

Just got a couple rolls of film developed today and had a few cool ones come out.

Charity Shop Bargains

I was very pleased this morning when I took a stroll into town and checked out the charity shops and found myself this Pentax for £3.99, I look forward to using this little babe. I also managed to find a couple copies of some old National Geographic's which I plan on using for some collages and got a couple rolls of film developed.

The Final 9

 So these (at the moment) are the final nine images from the shoot. I'm very pleased with the way these have turned out and are much better than I had first anticipated. I would love to know peoples thoughts about these images etc. 

(A link to my flickr incase the images are not very clear on here) 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ejgreaves77/

Orfordness Shoot 5th September / Experimenting

Whilst we were taking a well earned rest on the beach I stumbled across a rather strange but quite cool way to filter photos whilst taking them... Sunglasses.
It sounds weird and looks very strange but by holding a pair of sunglasses in front of my camera lens I managed to get some quite cool images out of it.
Whilst doing the shoot I did a few times try this out just to see if I could get any interesting photos from it. I did in the end get a few really good photos from it which I'll post in the next post. I will admit its not the best idea and could have easily edited the images afterwards but I thought it was just an interesting thing to try. These are a few of the tester images.

Orfordness Shoot 5th September / Location & thoughts

Orfordness is such a great location to visit and so peaceful, we took the ferry over about 12 o'clock and had a ramble around the base looking for some good locations to start shooting. We gladly had the weather on our side which means I was able to get some really nice natural lighting in my images. 

 For the past two evenings I've spent my time going through and editing the images from the shoot and I'm really happy with some of the pictures I've gotten. Although I managed to take about 200 images I've only really gotten a handful of final images that at the moment I am completely happy with.
I always find that quality is better than quantity so it never bothers me if at the end of the day I only end up with about three images to show for it. I find that I'm very judgemental of my own work and I find it very difficult to submitting or even showing other people my work unless I'm confident about it.

 

This part of the base is one of my favourites but sadly because of the state of the building its unsafe and inaccessible, however I managed to poke my camera through a hole in the wall to get a few other images of it. I think it would be such an amazing place to do a shoot but I'm not sure I want to risk breaking in and getting caught!. 

Whilst we there we also took the time to just enjoy the surroundings as the base leads on to a beach. I would recommend going to visiting if you don't mind walking and find that kind of thing interesting. This has been the second time I've visited and I do hope it won't be the last. Its so strange to also see certain parts of it and how its changed over the past year, for example the restricted area. Last time I visited most of it was flooded out. 

The preparation for the Orfordness shoot continues...

So Mikaela kindly came over with a bag full of tricks and when I say tricks I mean a bag full of wonderful clothes and possible outfits for the shoot. I've always trusted Mikaela's style and opinion when it comes to clothes so I though what better person to style it.

After having a look through the old pictures and the clothes she had bought with her we tried to pick out a specific style that would work well with the location. We decided on the word edgy. Once Mikaela had laid out all the outfits we did a few tester photos to see how they look on camera and trying out a few poses. I'm quite lucky in that Mikaela never feels completely uncomfortable in front of the camera and is always willing to listen to direction (even though I am awful at giving it) and also throwing her own mix into things. She's a great partner to work with which is why I guess I have used her so many times before.

The two top outfits are pretty much what we ended up going with. We thought that because of the harshness that might be some of the buildings that an all black outfit wouldn't quite stand out enough. We picked the purple dress because it would be such a contrast to the area in which I want to photograph her in and because I just think it really shows off the look we were going for.  

A first time for everything/Preparation

Usually when I set out on doing a little photo shoot I never plan it, I usually randomly pick a location and just take my camera down and see what happens. This time I thought I would try and plan it a bit more and share my thoughts and ideas on my blog. A few years back me and Iona took spontaneous trip down to a little place in Suffolk called Orfordness (a link to an article about it) an old Ministry of Defence base. The objective of the trip was just for me to simply boost up my portfolio and for Iona to get some drawing for an art class. I hadn't until recently thought about the location again but thought it would be a great place to revisit and use as a location for an actual photo shoot.

I've been looking through a bunch of the old photos to try and get an idea of the kinds of images I want to leave with.
I'm lucky that my wonderful friend Mikaela (who usually models in my photographs) is once again willing to help me out and be my model for the day.

After thinking about the location and having that pretty much sorted I then wanted to think about directing the model. Again usually I just shadow the model, because I usually get my shots from natural moments I don't often do a lot of directing. I've been looking a lot lately at the work of Rankin who has quickly become one of my favourite photographers. 

The first time I ever came into contact with this work was from a spontaneous purchase of Hunger Magazine    (which I posted about a while back).  I've been looking at the positions of the models mostly and trying to get a few ideas of the kinds of things I want for this shoot.

I know I will never be able to produce anything quite as wonderful as his work but what I found really useful about looking at his work is the angles in which he uses, the interaction and use of colours. I found these particular images useful as these are the kinds of positioning and posing I think would work really well with the location. Obviously when we at the location positions and such will hopefully fall into place as it will be better to visualise with the model in the same place.   

Photographs taken from my copy of Hunger Magazine; 

Clothing and the decision to use props or not are still in the thought process at the moment and hopefully by the end of tomorrow that will all be sorted as we're heading down to Orfordness on Wednesday morning. I'm really looking forward to it and quite intrigued as to what I'm going to end up with!.