Friday 3 June 2016

FMP- week 2

 After the first week of research and exploring I have come to the conclusion that I will be following the path of skateboarding as I feel this is the subject I could go the furthest in as I think it is interesting to get a perspective on a skaters view of escapism and what they do to feel free and escape, so in this second week I have began to look and different methods of shooting and I started to experiment with with long exposure and motion photography.
I first came across this by seeing 'Arturo Bragaglia's' work whilst exploring long exposures, 'Bragaglia' was a pioneer in Italian futurist photography and he did long exposures in the 1900's and mainly shot motion photography of peoples faces as you can see below.
                                   

I found 'Bragaglia's' work very interesting and I used it as inspiration for my own work as I wanted to incorporate long exposure into skateboarding and capture the movement in skateboarding. So I began to set up a shoot, I first completely blacked out a room and made sure no light was able to get in and cause any unnecessary exposures as that would have ruined the photo. Once i had set up the room I got a strobe light and placed it in a position where the light would expose the person on the skateboard each time the strobe light flickered. I set the camera to an exposure of 5 seconds so that it would capture 5 seconds of movement and as you can see below the outcome was very successful and I feel like I recreated 'Bragaglia's' work quite well.


I then put this photo in photoshop so I could put the finishing touches on recreating 'Bragaglia's' work as his work has a slight green tint on it so I changed the colour balance and made the image slightly more green to capture that same effect of 'Bragaglia's' work.

Unfortunately I didn't stick to this method of photography as I didn't feel I could develop it much further so I started to move on and carry on with my research. I did this by starting to look at 'Theo Pauls' work and as you can see below the photo is of a skateboard in focus while the background is blurred, I liked this style of shooting and i wanted to recreate this as 'Paul's' photo looks like its telling a story with the person holding a cigarette in the foreground who is obviously having a break and chilling out however its hard to see but there is a man doing a trick on his skateboard blurred in the background and you could even argue that the cigarette is the restriction to the skater.


When responding to 'Paul's' work I decided to include a part of a skateboard and use the depth of field  and had the part of the skateboard in focus in the foreground while the city is blurred in the background, when I took this photo I thought the skateboard part almost looked like a building in the city and it could represent skateboarding in the city and the contest between the working side of the city and then the escapism of skating in the city. Below you can see my response to 'Theo Paul's' work.


After looking at Theo Paul's work I started to research different documentaries exploring escapism in skateboarding and I came across a documentary called 'All This Mayhem' which was a documentary about two brothers who started skateboarding as a hobby and then became world class athletes, however it shows how they became addicted to drugs and abused them in way in which it affected their performance and they eventually ended up going to prison and one committed suicide. I felt as if this was a demonstration of too much freedom and they abused the freedom they had as they could have become successful world class athletes.

I responded to this by taking a photo of a skater behind the bars of the ramp, I did this to show the bars as the skaters restriction much like in the documentary the bars in the prison were the skaters restriction in that, I feel as if the skateboarder and the bars contrast well as an escapism and restriction and the bars represent the restriction.


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