Hello Everyone!
I’ve been back at college for a good week now and I’ve been doing a fair bit of shooting already, which is pretty exciting because I’ve been getting to work in a real photography studio for the first time! We’ve been doing a lot of lighting experiments, in preparation for when we do our own portrait shoots at the end of the unit (which I am planning to film, so check out my YouTube channel to see a BTS of that soon!) and I wanted to share some of the outcomes of those experiments!
I’ve got several more photos from the little experiment shoot we did, which I will be showcasing on my Instagram (@thephotographydragon) and in the portfolio section of my blog, so you can check them out if you want to see more! These were just some of my favourites from the shoot though and I especially had a lot of fun with the coloured gels.
High Key lighting is probably not one I’m going to gravitate towards very often because it isn’t really my style, but it will come in handy if I ever do some more professional portraits in the future. The gobos and the gels were what I was most excited about getting to play with though and they did not disappoint. I have actually played with gobos a little before during my school years, but at that point I didn’t have any kind of studio and I don’t have blinds in my house, so i actually cut up a cereal box to mimic the slats in a blind and had my mum hold it up and shine my phone torch through it! I was expecting the effect I got with actual blinds and a studio to be much better, but there actually isn’t a lot of difference (apart from the fact my photography has improved in general since then), which just goes to show that you don’t always need fancy equipment! Although you do need patience because I remember it taking me several hours to cut all of those long thin rectangles out without ripping the box…
I definitely had the most fun with the gels though because colour is such a powerful medium in story telling and can really set the tone of the image. I was just using one of my fellow classmates as a model and I wasn’t asking her to do anything in particular because we were just trying to get the feel of the gels and the studio, rather than taking meaningful images, so most of her poses are fairly neutral. I think this worked out in our favour though because the red, green and blue tinted photos all have such different feels to them because of the colour gel we chose without there being any input or prior planning to what we were going for.
I’ve got so many ideas for more fun portrait shoots (some of which I’ll be using in my end of unit shoot that I’m going to be filming some of for my YouTube channel: Samantha Drage!) and others that I’ll have to wait a bit longer to try out. If you live around the London area and are interested in modelling for me (any gender, any age over 16), then please contact me on the contact page because I would love to work with more creative people!
Goodbye for now!
Over and Out