Plans for the Shoot
During this shoot, I will be creating a look that is reflective of the 1950s. I will be focusing more on the rockabilly style of this decade as I want to create a look with dark lips and dark clothing. I will ask my model to have curly hair and wear black clothing with a leather jacket - similar to the iconic outfit that Sandy wears at the end of Grease. As this look is so widely recognised and linked to the 50s, it will help the viewer understand what time the image is supposed to represent. I will be using a beauty dish in this shoot and will shoot against a black background in order to create a lot of depth and contrast. In photoshop, I will add some grain and a gaussian blur to make the image appear old, and I will also make the image black and white as a lot of portraits that I found from the 50s were black and white.
What I Actually Achieved
I really enjoyed the outcome of this shoot and feel that I was successful in achieving what I had hoped to. The use of the beauty dish helped me capture the shadows and depth that I have been lacking in previous shoots, and helps create more contrast as the light was directed towards the face of the model, creating darker shadows in the background. One problem I did find was that, even when using the light meter, my images were slightly over exposed. However, when I researched further into 1950s photography, there was a lot of contrast in the images and so this turned out to be an advantage. I will have to ensure for future shoots that I keep an eye on this as it may not be beneficial for all of my shoots. Below is an image I did like and an image I did not like.
The contrast in this image is extremely strong, which is what I enjoy the most as it helped to draw the most attention towards her face. The fact that the contrasting tones were so high means that her hair slightly blends into the background, which is something that I find very visually pleasing. I also enjoy the framing of this image as I captured the model perfectly in the middle, which helps make her face the focal point of the image as it is perfectly centre. This shoot was certainly influenced by Milton Greene's portraits of Marilyn Monroe, as he often used dark tones in the rest of the image to bring attention towards her face.
This was an image that I did not like. I felt that the way she was slightly smiling at the camera did not work with the overall look as her looks is quite reflective of rebellion, and so I wanted her to have a moody or deadpan expression. Not only this, but I feel that the levels in this image are off as there seems to be a grey cast on her face, which I do not enjoy as it decreases the contrast and prevents her face from popping against the black of the rest of the image.
What I Am Going to Do Next
My next shoot will be focussed on the 1960s. I will be specifically focussing on the look of Twiggy and recreating this as it is such an iconic and universally recognised trend of that decade. To ensure that my images are successful, I will work on getting the levels on exposure right in my images as I do not want them to be too over exposed. I will also look at different poses beforehand and focus more on this as before I have just let the models pose how they want, rather than in a way that someone would have posed at the time/has posed in images from the 60s.
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