FMP - week 7

In week 7 I have started to finalise my ideas I began by focusing on portraits as I wanted to shoot two of my final images on a portrait so I looked at an artist named 'Aaron Smith' who shoots portraits of skaters and people at the skatepark, when Smith shoots his portraits the people in the photos have the key features which make up a skater stereo type, for example he shot a portrait of a girl with dyed hair and earrings as well as a famous skater with earrings and a nose piercing in, I like the style in which Smith shoots in as he uses nice composition and his photos say a lot which i want to show in my final images. I wanted to recreate Smiths work by using the same sort of composition he did in both my final portrait images and the response to his work, he uses rule of thirds well which is something I want to incorporate as well as juxtapositions and contradictions.

 Above you can see on the left is Smiths work and on the right is my response, I tried to capture the same elements Smith did in his photos I did this by taking my 35mm film camera to a skatepark in London where I devoted a day to shooting portraits of people at the skatepark and above is the photo I liked the most and which I thought best represented Smith's work, I tried to include contradictions by having the persons hat as black and the shirt as white, I also changed the photo to black and white in photoshop as well as changing the levels so that the photo came out better and looked sharper.


I then went on to photographing another portrait of one of the skaters sitting down eating an ice lolly, this was also shot on the 35mm camera and I liked the shot because it also resembled Smiths work. I decided not to edit this photo as I think it looked its best as the original, I also included the skaters shoes which are worn out and beaten which is a aspect I wanted to include in this photo. Photo shown below.

After shooting those portraits I continued on developing in portrait shooting, so I set up a photo shoot with my friend and began to shoot. From this shoot I wanted to get a set of photos of my female friend holding a skateboard, now as she is a model it shows the contrast between modelling and skating.

Here is one of the raw images on the left, however I ended up taking three photos all of which I edited in photoshop, two of the three photos I left in colour and just changed the vibrancy and levels and the third photo I changed to black and white as the shadows looked nicer. I really like how these images came out and I may use them for my final images however I'm undecided.
During this week I have managed to select the two images I will be using for the landscape. I just need to get them printed onto a4 and a3. as for the portraits I wanted both images to contrast well together, so I will select them carefully to pick the photos I think sum up my project the best.




I then was out half way through the week when the weather was bad and it was raining, so I went to a skatepark I found and took some shots of the skatepark covered in rain as I thought the rain or weather was the restriction preventing the skaters from skating the ramps. image shown to the left.






I also started to select the final images for my final display, when selecting the images I wanted to pick the strongest images, however I also wanted to pick the images which I thought best summed up my project as a whole. So I got the contact sheets on the images I had shot for the final piece and selected the images I wanted to use. In week 8 I will begin the development of my final images and experiment with a few different edits, I also plan to lay out the images in a gallery format and have two images portrait in a frame contrasting with each other and I then also want to have two landscape images in a frame contrasting with each other.