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!.