My Visual Diary - Music Photography

This morning we had the chance to shoot in the style of our desired music photographer from the lecture yesterday morning. We were given the freedom of working wherever we wanted around the town; taking photographs we thought would work and which were inspired by a specific artist or piece.

I chose Laura Levine as I really liked her style, I'm a big fan of black and white portraiture and fashion shoots so it all rolled into one. My favourite piece was her photograph below of Boy George sat next to a wall. I really liked the compostition of this piece and the depth of field work within the photo. The focus is mainly on the foreground and Boy George which I thought really pulled him out of the piece.

As this was my favourite piece, this is the one I decided to respond to and work with. To get a photograph like hers, I had to find something for my model to lean on; this could be a wall or something standing alone. We searched around the town for a little while just looking for a corner wall with a nice distance back along the side of it, I decided that I wasn't too keen on a lot of what we found because the areas weren't what I was hoping for, so instead of doing it out of the college we made our way back. We went into the library hoping to find something useful, thankfully I managed to find the perfect spot. There are plenty of bookshevles around so I chose one with a nice side feature and sat my model in front of it. I showed the model the photo so she could try and replicate the pose as well as change it up slighly to make it her own. I altered the aperture to get the main focus on the model and not so much on the background. I used an aperture of F 18 which meant a lot of the focus was on the model at the front. When I was taking the photo I was looking for the same sort of compostition as the original; the model on the left. After taking mulptiple photos to try and get one good one, I downloaded them to the computer and started to go through them; picking out what worked and what didn't. Eventually after choosing the one I liked, I opened it in photoshop and started editing it in order to make it more in the style of Laura Levine. To do this I changed the photo from colour to black and white as well as going through the levels and curves. I then enhanced the depth of field by making the background a bit more blurred in comparison to the front. After, I then cropped the photo as there was more of the bookshelf to the models left side but I didn't want it to be like that.

Looking at my photo now that it's finished, I have realised that I could've focused more on the model as it's quite rough and blurred. Another thing I could've done better would be to not include so much of the right-hand bookshelf as there's nothing like that in the photograph. I could've also grasped onto Laura Levines use of border. In her case it wasn't an added border as she used film camera where when she went to print the photos, she would have the choice to leave on the edge for effect. Other than that I like the photo as it clearly represents Laura Levine's Boy George piece.