My Visual Diary: Week 2, Day 2

Yesterday, we had a lecture on different music photographers that have been very famous throughout the decades. We had to make notesw on all of the photographers and then choose a photographer whose style we liked because we were going to do a shoot based on their style. Our photographers to choose from were:

- Herman Leonard an American photographer from 1923-2010

- Jim Marshall also an American photogrpaher from 1936-2010

- Annie Leibovitz another American photographer born in 1949

- Anton Corbijn a Dutch photographer born in 1955

- Laura Levine

-David La Chapelle

- Mick Hutson an English photographer

- Tom Oldham an English photographer who also studied at Plymouth College of Art in the 1990's

- David Redfern an English photographer also

I chose Tom Oldham as I liked the way he focused on the facial features in his portraits and also because he studied here and has madehimself a very successful photographer. Tom is now Richard Bransons personal photographer for Virgin which is a massive deal.

Tom focuses on different photo styles but related to music, takes pictures of musicians in the style of portraits. He works in both colour and greyscale but mainly colour as he likes to make the pictures look modern. In his pictures it looks like he uses studio lighting as you can see that on some of the portriats they have one side of their face more defined and enhanced than the other. Tom also likes to take pictures from a lower angle as it shows off different features in the portraits and different facial expressions from different angles. One final technique that Tom does is that he takes portraits without a person actually being in the picture a sthey have recognisable features without them needing to be there. This technique really stood out to me because I liked that he thought about the features that people recognise a person from without nessesarily being there.

My ideas for the shoot today were to:

- try close up portraits

- edit in greyscale

- possibly use lighting

- shoot a portrait behind a blank canvas/ blank wall

- try lower angles

I decided to focus my photograph on this Alicia Keys portrait by Tom:

I chose this image because it was a pose that was quite easy to make out without having a studio rented out as I only had certain places that I could shoot as only some walls were just plain white. After finding a wall that I could use to shoot my portrait I started to take the pictures. I had to keep taking pictures and stopping to see what the light was like and how focused my images were as I didn't have a tripod. I had to keep changing my ISO and my aperture to make my depth of field focus in more on the model. In the end I came out with a few good images but I chose one this was the one that I chose:

After the shoot we edited our pictures and put our image next to a screenshot of the orignal image.

I first found the image on my phone so I was working off an image that was saved on my phone. Unfortunately the image on my phone showed the portrait without her shoulders so I didn't see Alicia Keys with her hands touching her shoulders. Because of this my image doesn't look similar to the image as much as I would have liked because I didn't see the shoulders. Also my depth of field isn't very good probably because I am against a plain background so if I was to do this again I would have my model Yasmin putting her hands on her shoulders and maybe shoot my portrait in a different atmosphere so that my depth of field could be shown. I am happy with the pose that I got though and that I have a bit of shadow by the side of my model just like Tom has in his image of Alicia Keys.

With this image compared to some of my other images you can see that I have learnt about white balance and ISO compared to other weeks on my photos as my photo is in the correct lighting and in the correct focus.

I chose this photo out of all of the other photos from this shoot because this one was the best one that had the correct white balnce and ISO as I am getting used to using a DSLR camera. This links very well back to my artist research of Tom Oldham as it looks very similar to his image but without the hands on the shoulders.