When exploring the aesthetic values I wanted to consider when shooting my first street fashion portfolio piece, I found the best way to do this was to create a mood board that visually showed me what elements I thought worked and didn't work and so through process of elimination I came up with a number of images juxtaposing each other that over all represented the message and aesthetic I wished to translate. This mood board helped me to engage with my piece and finally let me visualise what exactly it was iI wanted to see beyond my camera lens, the location I chose to shoot was influenced by this mood board as was the make up and clothing, it gave me a clear vision of how i wanted it to look and also underpinned the homeless mood held within.
None of the images above are my own, all have been sourced from the internet
Concept:
I wanted to create a fashion image with huge influence from the streets and what happens there, I went into the shooting knowing i wanted to end up with a black and white image and so the clothes and make-up reflect this decision. I chose items with hard contrasts and bold statements, urban and trashy jewellery and a messy stubborn hair style. I didn't want this to be a your stereotypical polished fashion shot, i wanted the rawness of the image to seep through and compliment the concept. I planned to finish it off with a hard monochrome edit and retouch some what influenced from the edits you see of William Klein's work.
Execution:
To truly achieve a realistic street feel I took the model out into the streets and photographed her on location, this was a vital factor that later contributed to the raw feel I wanted. Once on location I was lighting the model using a Canon Speedlite 430ex ii, this flash worked really well at lighting the shot, it gave me sharp aggressive shadows across the face which is exactly what I wanted. I tried various different approaches to framing and composition with this shoot and finally I started to see progression when framing down at an angle from above the models face, this perspective showed nice curvature of the face and intensity around the eyes and brow. We tried numerous poses and positions from this perspective and finally got the collection of shots that i wanted to take further into test edits and crops.
Makeup:
I wanted hard contrasts in the final image and so the makeup needed to reflect this on the face before post production. A light foundation was added to enhance the highlights around the face, this was broken up by a harder shade emphasising the cheeks that would eat up some of the hard light as it hit the face to give it some shape. This harder tone added to the shapes created by the hard shadows across the face and body and so all tied in together nicely.
Costume:
The costume was chosen with same thing in mind as the makeup, hard contrasts. I chose a white and black garment to really highlight the contrasts across the body, the clothing itself was mainly influenced by the clothing from one of Jack Eames shots. In the left hand side of my mood board their is a bold black and white latex garment and that is what spurred on the hard black and white theme of the shoot even more so than before. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't find access to that kind of costume because I believe I could get some stunning material if working with a professional stylist however at this stage I have to make do and hand craft or buy everything myself.
This was one of the shots:
Post production:
The image taken in camera was far from what I wanted the final image to look like however I still felt that the in camera material was strong. The process of editing itself wasn't to complicated with this image, because I wanted it to look raw there was no need for an acute beauty retouch. I first started by RAW processing the image, adding in more blacks and contrast to create a harder aesthetic and adding a little more clarity just to make the edges pop. I then took the image into photoshop and added a monochrome filter, I adjusted the colour options within this filter to gain the best contrasts possible until i had a hard even look across the photograph. After adjusting the over all look i went into more detail dodging and burning areas of the face to make them pop a little more and added in sharpness on certain areas of the tights and jewellery. To finish of the image i chose to crop in quite tight so that the main focus was on the tension of the eyebrows and the movement of the jewellery.
these were the final edits:
I am really happy with the final results however I can definitely see room for improvement, as this was one of my first photo shoots it is hard for me to compare it to some of my more recent work however from my knowledge of hardware at the time I am happy with what I got. The harsh shadows from the Speedlite flash add to the raw element of the piece and bring out the hard contrasts beautifully. Some of the shadows within the frame I am not happy with and so if i was to shoot this again I would bring an off camera shoe mount to give me more freedom with the angles I could use the flash from.
