Today in class, we talked about photographers who inspired our photography or who inspired us to start photography. I spoke about Mikko Lagerstedt. Mikko Lagerstedt was the photographer that first inspired me to try photography. He is a Finnish photographer who is famous for his landscape and astrophotography photographs. I was inspired by him to start photography because before seeing his images, I had no idea there was a way of photographing the Milky Way above a landscape using a normal DSLR camera. As someone who used to do science, the idea intrigued me as it felt like the perfect mix of two things I love as well as I loved how atmospheric and untouched the landscapes in his images looked. This inspired me want to try astrophotography myself to see what I galaxies and stars I could capture around my local landscapes. 

Below are three of my all time favourite pictures from Mikko Lagerstadt.

Then, we were given the first mini brief which is to shoot a front cover for a CD. 

To get some ideas of what kind of CD cover I would like to produce, I thought more about music I was interested in and the kind of CD covers they would have as well as a photographer who's CD cover is one of my favourite images. 

Alan Levenson is a famous Los Angeles portrait and stock photographer, working for clients such as Bloomberg, IBM and Forbes as well as an extensive list of celebrity clients. One of his most well known photographs is of the 80s J-City Pop artist Mariya Takeuchi. This image was used as the album art for Takeuchi's single Sweetest. However, it has since wrongly been associated with Mariya Takeuchi's other single Plastic Love. 

The reason why this image is one of my favourite images is because it gives me a very warm feeling as Mariya Takeuchi's expression gives a feeling of being open. I also love the fact it seems candid although it has very obviously been staged. The movement of her hair and her body turning in towards the camera is what gives it the candid feel. 

I have since tried to recreate an album cover inspired by Alan Levenson's image of Mariya Takeuchi using the editing software Nix. 

However, since I had already shot this before the brief, I wanted to use Alan Levenson as inspiration and a reminder that I wanted with my CD cover shoot to create a mood and a feeling when looking at the image to make the viewer feel a certain type of way. 

I have also created a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired me when I was researching and brainstorming ideas for this CD cover shoot.

To further decide on the theme for my CD cover, I decided to create a moodboard, making sure to include the style of what I would like the model to wear as well as the colour schemes and other album covers as inspiration. 

Alongside this planning, I also attended an exhibition on album cover art at the photographers gallery entitled For the Record: Photography & the Art of the Album Cover. I found a lot of inspiration at this exhibition and it demonstrated all the ways in which photography can be used for album cover art, from digital photography to film photography too and how album cover art can also be emotive. I have put some images below of album covers that inspired my own project and ideas further.

This week I went to shoot my model for the CD cover shoot brief. To shoot these images, I used my:

-Nikon D750

-Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 85mm f/1.8G Lens

-Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4G ED VR Lens

-x2 Elinchrom D Lite 4 studio lights

-x2 LED Light Wands

Once I had shot my images, I then had to edit them and put the final images inside this template which acts as a fake CD cover sleeve.

Since I was unable to use this exact template, I had to create my own using the measurements and then as my images to that once they were edited. As I was quite happy with the overall images, most of the editing was using the spot healing brush tool to remove elements the background that were distracting like the lines in the below picture.

I then added a title for the album using text and a parental guidance label to the front cover.

Below is the finished CD Cover cover sleeve. Overall, I am very happy with how these images turned out. However, if I was to shoot this again, I would like to use an actual studio to shoot the images so I could get more of a variety of poses with my model as shooting it in his garage which is quite small made it hard to utilise a lot of poses I had in mind. The reason I didn't book out the studio for this is because my model didn't have much time to shoot, so I wasn't able to organise the studio in time. 

For the next brief, I have to shoot multiple images in a documentary photography format. 

I decided that for this part of the brief, I wanted to photograph my boyfriend Tom who's hobby involves painting miniatures. The reason why I wanted to document this is because he often paints Warhammer 40k miniatures in his spare time and has a space dedicated to both displaying them and painting and building them. 

I really love the way Jeff Wall composes his images, especially "After 'Invisible Man'" as the way it is composed feels as though you are seeing into the models mind as if you are looking through a tunnel that encapsulates his life in the environment surrounding him. I would like to try and capture something similar in my documentary photography and give the viewer the idea that they know my model. 

I love the way that Corporal Danny Houghton captures his images from the perspective of a soldier out on the field as with both of the above images, the audience feels like they are there on the battlefield looking through the Corporal's eyes. I also love the moody feel of the edits, really gives off the air of despair of being on the battlefield and what it would feel like to be a soldier in those situations. These colours and way of editing inspire me to perhaps try and capture a specific feeling with my editing for this next brief and also to try and take some photos that put the viewer into the subjects perspective.

Before I shot my brief, there was a short lesson on learning how to shoot portraits both inside and outside using lighting to balance the light in the image and how to edit the images so the lights used don't show or effect the image in post production on Photoshop. Firstly, photos were taken of two my classmates outside using portable elinchrom lights. Then another image was taken of the background behind them without the external lighting. 

Once the class was back inside, the images were opened in Capture One first before exporting them into Photoshop.  

We started off with both images like this and then on the one with just the background without people, we started off by duplicating the background. After duplicated the background, I then dragged the image with my classmates in it over the top of the two background layers, creating layer 1. 

Then I added a layer mask to layer one, making sure that the brush was on black before painting over the part that had the lighting in it bringing through the part of the image underneath. 

However, since that part of the image now looked a bit too dark in comparison, I added the first curves mask, making sure to first use the masking tool over the area I wanted to change the curves of. 

This helped make the shadows in the image more believable and less as if something within the image had been covered up/was missing.

Finally, I added one last mask over my classmates bodies and used a curve layer to make them appear a bit brighter. Below is the final image.

Overall, I found this editing class very useful and this method would become a method I would use in the post production part of my Fashion project. 

Post production for these images was fairly simple as I mainly cropped, adjusted exposure and added a filter affect to them. I added the same filter affect to all of the final images to try and keep the editing looking consistent.

I had to adjust exposure mainly because my model had to use a very bright lamp to be able to pain the miniatures properly, this meant that some of the highlights in the images were very blown out. Below is the selection of final images I chose.

Overall, I enjoyed shooting these documentary images and I am very happy with how they came out. However, if I was to shoot these images again, I would perhaps want to use a lens with a longer focal length to make sure the lamp doesn't effect my images as much or even use a macro lens to get closer to the smaller details of the miniatures themselves.

Since the final mini brief for this brief is Environmental Portraiture, I decided I wanted to make it link to the above project and use the same model and environment for the portrait.

For this brief, I have to shoot a portrait of someone in their environment. I decided that I wanted to continue and complete the set by using my model from my previous brief about documentary photography for this one too.

In order to gain inspiration for these images and this brief, I decided to research environmental portrait photographers. 

These images are my favourite because whilst the background is not the environment which the models became famous for, the background environment is symbolic of the models story. For instance, the emptiness surrounding Muhammed Ali in the image on the left represents how Muhammed Ali is trapped inside himself now due to the Parkinson's that now afflicts him due to his previous line of work and for the portrait on the right, the horse in the shadows of the background represents the model, Ron Turcotte's, career as a jockey.

These images inspire me to want to try and get some subtle element or reference in my image of what his environment represents for his story.

Arnold Newman is the photograph known for inventing the idea of environmental portrait photography. Newman began his career in 1938 when he started dabbling in documentary photography when he was shooting in studios across Philadelphia, Baltimore and West Palm Beach. Not long after he began shooting this type of photography, his work began to get recognised and he began working for publications such as Fortune, LIFE and Harper's Bazaar. In later interviews regarding the images he creates with his models, Arnold Newman said "It is what they are, not who they are, that fascinates me". Below are two of my favourite images of his.

I like these images because they both represent and tell the story of the model within the photograph well. I particularly like that Arnold Newman captured someone in the background in motion for the right image as the portrait was of Agnes de Mille who was a dancer and choreographer so motion was at the heart of her daily life. This inspires me to try and capture something similar that incorporates important aspects of my models life that pertains to their environment. 

After finishing research, I decided to sketch out what I would like the image to look like when I was taking the image to give my model and idea of how I wished for the environment to be set up for the shoot.

As my Nikon D750 is still away for repairs, I had to use my Sony A7ii body with Nikkor 24-120mm F4 lens again with my Urth adaptor, meaning that I had to also shoot in manual. 

This time I also decided to use one of my Elinchrom D Lite studio lights with a softbox as the location is very dark without extra light and so I may have be unable to see the subject within the images otherwise.

Once the images were taken, I didn't do very much post production as I felt the images only needed some light retouching so I adjusted shadows a bit, cropped the image a tiny bit and added a filter to try and make the colours of the miniatures within the image stand out.

This is the final image I chose for this brief. Overall, I am happy with how this image turned out but I encountered many struggles shooting this shoot as it is very dark inside the location and even with the Elinchrom's modelling light on it made it very hard for me to see the model in my camera's viewfinder/screen without turning the ISO up quite a bit which is something I was not prepared to do since it added quite a lot of grain, so it meant quite a lot of the shots were out of focus. This could've been solved if I had bought my tripod as I would've been able to shoot at slower speeds without causing blur or having important parts of the image being out of focus. However, I forgot to bring my tripod for this shoot, sadly. If I was to shoot this again, I would definitely make sure to bring my tripod to alleviate some of the stress caused by having to shoot at speeds in which image had blur or shakiness due to my natural hand shakes.

I have throughly enjoyed this unit and trying the different types of photography given to us in the mini brief. If I was to do this mini brief again, the main thing I would try differently is perhaps to find strangers whom I don't know to model for me and show their stories for me in the final two mini briefs as I feel it could've been interesting for me to get to know some different types of people and their stories.