Shoot 7

Whilst trying to plan for this shoot I was struggling to come up with a main feature and/or character type so my first step to clear that was to look around the room I was in and see what sticks out to me as something which could help make a bold, personal statement. The first thing my eyes came across was my guitar. In my family and family friend groups there are quite a lot of people who play the guitar or in bands which immediately made me think of ways of composing an image around guitarists and the musical type of person. As we hold guitars (much like most instruments) with our hands, that's when the idea came to mind. Whilst I had all of these ideas buzzing around my head I set up my camera on a self timer so that I could capture my hands with the guitar to see how the dynamics and idea would work. The [;an in my head was to just take as many photos as possible which could result in deep contrasting shadows/highlights as well as highlighting the rawness of the hand and bringing out details,

The picture to the right is of my hand which if you look and think closely you can see from how out of focus it is. I set the self timer so that I could experiment with the idea of using a guitar as a prop before shooting with anyone else. As you can see, because of the camera being on auto focus, it didn't pick up the details I would have wanted but I guess it's a start. Other than the way the image is focused and the shallowness of clarity and detail the image did clear up a lot for me when editing. I feel like since completing the shoot the other day where I looked mainly into lighting and how it effects an image, I've been able to make good choices regarding the way light hits the subject. I was happy with the way I positioned this as it had just enough shadow to make it bold as well as highlights which pulled out main details. As I've said before in previous posts, black and white imagery is definitely the way I'm going in this project as I feel it unites the varieties being targeted in the work. After taking images of my own hands and editing them I still wasn't happy with the way the hand itself looked and that was down to the lack in clarity and sharpness. The images I produce need to be full of detail about the person and how their hands contribute to what they do and the images of my hands just weren't cutting it. After sorting through the images I decided to set up the camera once again but this time using someone else as a hand model. As my dad was in the house and is a big music fan anyway I thought this could work a lot better that not having manual control of the camera. Before taking the images with my dad I looked back at a project I had researched named 'A Show of Hands' by Tim Booth as I remembered seeing a photo of Sir Cliff Richard's hands with his guitar

To the left is my favourite shot from today's little experiment as I feel it defines the sort of work I want to produce in the upcoming weeks. I definitely want to stick with the black and white theme as it's a way of connecting the various identities and characters but other than that as long as the hands tell a story they can vary however fits. I like this piece as the detail in the hands stand out as when I edited it I increased the clarity and sharpness. I think this is definitely going to be a key element and thing I'll have to look out for across all of my photographs as it can definitely make a piece and show-off the different people. The composition was very key when taking and editing this image as

Overall I think this shoot went well, not because my photographs were the best but because it gave me inspiration and a rough final idea for for my final piece. I definitely want to stick with photographing hands as I feel it's an interesting alternative approach to portraiture. It's a good way to get people to notice characteristics instead of constantly focusing on more stereotypical things such as titles and faces.