Fashion Photography - Lighting (Part II) P2/Q1: Diary Entry

The assignment for this project was to produce nine large (30x40 cm)prints of fashion photography, 3 of each three categories: Clothing, Shoes, Accessories, keeping in mine lighting techniques and effects and using a lens other than 50mm. I used my Nikon 70-300mm zoom lens which isn't mine at all, rather my mom's but it worked well for this.

The hard part was having nine printable images out of a contact sheet. I shot a first batch of my little brother modeling for me. He got very into it, which was good, and several of my images came from these. Then I shot a selection of shots ranging from catching my mom before she went out to dinner to taking my little brother again after a soccer game. Unfortunately, I blurred these, and many of my prints are from a day when my friends and I went apple picking. As for developing, I learned that you really do have to pay attention to the film's ISO number. For example, using 100 speed film, I think that each shot that I took with a shutter speed below that became grainy when enlarged. I also learned how important it is to take an image in the frame that you want and not count on being able to zoom in later, as you can with digital photography. As we were already enlarging the images quite a bit, zooming in to one section became impossible. Also, I am just much more pleased with the outcome when I like the images to begin with. The first print that I developed was also my favorite: the one with the baseball gripped in my brother's hand. The ones from the apple picking day were harder to work with. I think that the light situations were quicker in changing than I was, so they all came out differently, and each print was basically starting from square one as far as aperture, time, and filters needed. For the ones where my brother was set up specifically for me to take pictures, and I had a tripod and all the time in the world, they came out more predictably, and for the three prints of him in his collegiate outfit, it was easy to start from the same settings as the previous print and work from there. The project took several weeks. In some lessons, I would be as successful to get 2 prints, while in others none. Then on the last day, I stayed during my free and hammered out the last 4 prints. I am pretty pleased with the outcome of the project, mainly because since there are nine prints, there is a lot of range in what is covered.

I think that it would be interesting to reprint some of the images in different sizes, and piece them together. For instance, on the shots of my little brother, I took several views: torso, neck, and hip areas, and to mount these all together in different sizes so as to make up the overall fashion idea out of the zoomed in shots of the small details.