Component 2 Final Pieces - Russell James Attempt 2.

Following my first attempt at trying to emulate Russell James, I will be taking the idea of our social media environment but putting both happy and sad emotions into one photograph, instead of creating a series oh photographs that just have one emotion on show.  For this next idea, I shall be editing the person within the shot to make it look as if they have a twin with the complete opposite emotion.  This will have more of an impact on a viewer as both emotions are juxtaposing each other tremendously.  I have also come up with the idea of putting my photographs into a mini flip book, so when you flip the book, the mini clip shows the girl taking a selfie, but as the book goes on, we see her lower the phone and look at the photograph she's taken with a sad expression.

The photograph below shows how people show themselves off to others via social media, but if you saw that same person face to face and not through a screen, you'd be able to see their true feelings.

This photograph shows how we feel about our bodies, and how we act around others;  On one side you have the confident persona where you aren't afraid to be yourself in your own skin and not care what others think, and on the other you have the persona of secrecy and unwillingness to show your body to others, and so you keep it to yourself 

Below is the flip book I made;  It shows the small journey from happy to sad.  She begins by taking a 'selfie', looking all happy and showing her smile off to others, but as you flip the book on and progress to the end,  you see her lower her phone and look at the photograph she has just taken with a sullen, melancholy look.

Contact sheets:

Russell James Attempt 1.

For my next artist I will be studying, I shall be using the style of Russell James, who is a famous modelling, beauty, and lingerie photographer who has a huge portfolio of shoots he has done for companies like Vogue, W, American Photo, and Victoria's Secret.  I wish to combine the style of Russell along with the idea of 'social media', and the fake world we live in.  What I mean by this is you could see a photograph of a beautiful woman's face, yet the bottom half is not shown to the audience, as this could change your view on the person within the shot;  They could be wearing a bin bag as clothing yet still have the face of an angel.  We most often than not hide the negative things within our life, and only show and broadcast the positive moments to the rest of the world;  This links back to my theme of showing the viewers both sides of the story and emotion in this next series of photographs.

These are some of the photographs I have taken which are inspired by Russell James:

The next set of photographs are the ones I have taken to emphasise how people often show only the positives to the public through social media, and keep the negatives to themselves.

Below are the contact sheets for the photographs above.  I feel the shoot went really well, and I only had the odd photograph that went wrong with either the aperture or ISO, but on the whole it was a very successful shoot and the photographs I got are very appealing to the eye:

Burying a strip of film

On the 13th February I went out into my garden and buried a strip of film about 30 centimetres into the ground.  I will then dig it back up in a few months time and observe and document the effects the earth and nature has had on it.  With in being under ground, it'll be interesting to see if any of it has been either eaten or corroded by the earth.  Here are some photographs I have taken to document the process of the experiment.

Marcus McAdam and Brandon Seidler

Marcus McAdam is a photographer from Scotland who focuses more on the landscape and that which surrounds him.  His photographs are very high contrasting, containing many colours, but mostly the prime colours stand out above the rest.  As you see in the photographs below, his eye for the land is very trained, as the curves and lines all converge on each other, and this really draws the eye and allows you to skim the page with there always being something to look at;  This could be the fine detail of a cloud sailing across the sky, or the shimmering of the mountainside within a lake.  As I have been inspired by McAdam, I have planned a trip to Scotland for a week to see if i can emulate some of his photographs;  Maybe try to capture some of the immense landscape photographs he's taken.

Another artist I will be using is Brandon Seidler.  He uses the film that has his photographs of the landscape on, and dips or sprays them with corrosive or staining liquid.  This gives a really awkward look to the photograph as it's supposed to be a really serene setting, with lots of positive colours, but instead he's caused the image to look negative by using blood reds and darker colours.

Below are some photographs I have taken from my trip to Scotland.  They are based on both themes taken from McAdam and Seidler, that theme being bright and positive colours.  When I was at Fort William, the sun hardly showed it's face, so the photographs taken by McAdam were hard to emulate as I couldn't get any that were bright, but I did take some that have a lot of positive colours in, which I can still use to combine the two styles together.  As I took my photographs with a digital camera and not an analogue camera, I will not be able to do the exact effect Seidler has done, as he used acids and other chemicals to corrupt his photographs.  Instead, I shall be flicking negative coloured paints (Reds, blacks, browns, etc...) onto a sheet of A4 paper, scanning it onto the computer, and then putting that over the top of my photographs in Photoshop.

The photographs below are my final products of the above photographs combined.  I changed the levels round to make the scenery brighter and the blood red darker, as this creates a more contrasting environment, and also makes both landscape and blood stand out that little bit more.

Here are the contact sheets for this themed shoot: