FMP Week 7

Weekend-

Today I did my final final shoot with Ailsa! I had a quick scout around Ashtead Park where I usually shoot my photos but it turned out that right now considering my garden is so overgrown it actually made a great location for this shoot! Luckily the sun came out and we got some awesome speckled light on her skin, something quite different from my other images which pretty much all have super soft, even lighting. I reckon this will make the images a little more relate-able to the real world as opposed to the super clean studio shots. I shot quite a lot of the same images to increase my chance of the sun being in the right places. We both enjoyed the shoot and already I was confident that it was a good idea to re-shoot despite having to scrap the other images.

When we finished I started by editing one of the spur of the moment images- her hand touching the paint on her neck. I was wondering whether to keep the scenery green or to change it to match the gold paint/blood. I decided, at least for this first edit, gold suited more as it unified the colours well and brought the image together. I may change my mind later though as having a green background could make the gold paint stick out a bit more. I used a vignette to draw attention to the gold paint.

With this edit I decided to hold back on the tone evening as I usually do on my other images; instead I accentuated the different variations of tone in the skin. I think it really added to the vulnerable look and made the fairy much more relatable with the ‘real world’.

Monday-

I finished editing the first image and did a test print, it came out pretty good and I only noticed a few detail changes I would make. Moses pointed out that the gold paint looked a little bit too dry (which it was) and I may need to go back in and make it look a little more liquid like.

I really like the first image ‘Marked’ but I’m not sure how I would fit it in with the rest as it is the only non-square format image, it may turn out to be another nice standalone image to add to the collection (which is definitely not a bad thing!).

I started editing a couple other photos from the shoot, currently they are in a circle format but I may change my mind about that soon.

After spending a little time with these images I am pretty pleased that I decided to simplify my idea even if it meant leaving my previous work behind- it was a sacrifice I had to make. These images evoke curiosity instead of giving you the story on a plate.

Wednesday-

I finished editing ‘Wounded’ (the legs image), I settled on the turquoise-green rather than gold as I feel it draws more attention to the gold paint- you can see it’s a different colour to everything else.
I kept the circle format; I think it works very well to produce an old fashioned fairy tale feel and not a modern, boxy feel. I added grey outside of the circle but this may get removed when I mount it.

Thursday-

I went to The Print Space and had a chat with one of the staff there- she showed me all of the papers I could print on, both C-Type and Giclee. Giclee seemed the more obvious choice for fine art as the papers had a much more textural feel. The lady helping me suggested Photorag as she thought the the more soft dreamy look would suit my work. The only downside to Photorag is that it is very fragile and if you run your nail along the surface the ink comes off- so I chose another paper to test as well (Pearl) that had a similar nice texture but was far less fragile.
I went home and ordered test strips of one of my images on both of these papers- I will decide which is better when I get them back tomorrow.

The test strips I ordered are 20” long, but thinking about the size of 3 of these it’s quite big. I may get 15” or 12” prints instead depending on the size of our display. (I still haven’t got the accurate dimensions of the display yet!)

I will talk to Tom about whether he feels photorag would survive the mounting process as it’s being done at Ravensbourne.

Friday-

I picked up my prints- looks like the Pearl has a nicer, more obvious texture than the Photorag. We also got the dimensions of the display boards- I worked out that the best print size would be 15”x15”. I made some sketches of layouts that I might use, at the moment I think a triangle arrangement would look best- the layout determines whether things are looked at as a story or a hierarchy or as one image. I also found out about the mounting process, it looks like it won’t harm the paper. Also thinking about border, I could do it with flowers (have to be careful with getting good gold paint) or I could do it with gold leaf.