Portraiture Photography | Megan Barnes

I found the negative for this post a few days ago during a routine tidy of my room. Wherein, I found a set of 35mm negative I had developed inside the pages of a book, presumably to keep it safe and flat. And after putting the strip up to the window I remembered what the shots were. It was for a project at college. It was a portraiture based assignment and even back then I knew I preferred portraiture over most other aspects of photography.

And for this photograph I wanted to get creative. At the time I was majorly influenced I would say by Cindy Sherman and her set of untitled film stills. In the untitled film stills set Cindy Sherman would create a full set of self portraits by place herself in photographs. And these photographs were able to represent any number of films. I’m probably not describing it well enough in all honesty. If you type ‘Untitled Film Stills’ in Google then you should see what I mean.

Although I wasn’t interested in creating an image with myself as the subject I was interested in the notion of creating a photograph that looked like a generic film still. A friend of mine called Megan was happy to be the subject in this portrait session. The photographs were taken on black and white film that I processed myself using a Pentax K1000 35mm SLR camera. If you are wondering what SLR means check the post I have linked to below for an explanation.

Documentary Photography | Woods & Porter, Dartford
Date Posted: Friday 24^th September 2010

It also links to a post where I interviewed the owner of a local camera shop about his store closing down and also includes some history on the store itself.

I have only included a single black and white shot in this post as it was the only usable shot on the strip of film that I found. And to be honest it was my favourite shot from the entire shoot that night. They were taken at around midnight to 1am on a cold night. Although I cannot remember the exact date that the shots were taken. Though I do remember it was in December 2005. They were taken at the same place as the shots of Ashley James, but as you can see from the link below they are of absolutely no resemblance to each other.

Portraiture Photography | Ashley Martin James
Date Posted: Tuesday 21^st September 2010

Also if you check out that post you can learn a little something about Depth of Field and Aperture. Good things to know if you want to get into using your camera in Manual or Semi-Manual Mode. I feel that I achieved what I set out to with this shot. I was helped on the night with lighting by my friend Tommi Gibbons. I think I might recreate this style of shot soon as I was really happy with the photograph that I had achieved. For lighting we used some floodlights that were already on the sight and we rearranged them so that it worked well.

If you would like to contact me for anything, be it questions about the content of the blog of any other enquiry then feel free to use the all new ‘Contact Richard Anthony Morris’ page above. As I believe the old contact page did not work as I wanted it to. Thanks.

Documentary Photography | Woods & Porter, Dartford

Walking into Woods & Porter on West Hill in Dartford you get the sense of a true camera shop. Lenses lined up in cabinets and a whole shop with cameras, equipment and books on photography. Many of them are older than myself. This was a welcome sight for me as I have always wanted to work in a camera shop. I find myself not counting places like Jessops & Currys as camera shops, as I have worked in both of them and they are only really interested in selling the brand new models. When I first started at Jessops a lot of the stock was film based with a healthy supply of darkroom but if you were to enter a Jessops store today, it’s not the same sight and although I am fully aware that the market is now digital, I have always had a tendency, a fondness if you will for film photography. As it has often been said, I was born 20 years too late.

When in the past I had a spare twenty minutes or so I would pop into the store. Mainly just to look around but I enjoyed the atmosphere in there all the same. Don’t get me wrong I had bought items from there in the past and sent a few things in for repair. I sent a Centon K200 camera into the shop for repair because my little brother wanted a digital SLR and I told him he had to master a film SLR first. He mastered the film SLR fine but it didn’t hold his interest too long as his first love is music and so he didn’t pursue getting a digital SLR. Just so you know, an SLR is a camera that is mainly characterised by having a mirror system internally allowing you to see out of the lens [which are interchangeable] and therefore being able to frame your shot perfectly. This mirror system is called a Single Lens Reflex giving us the acronym SLR. As you probably know if you have read this blog before, I try to do more than just a paragraph and several photos. I try to tech a little bit here and there. As well as an SLR [Single Lens Reflex] you can get a TLR [which is an acronym for a Twin Lens Reflex]. I have used a TLR is a few posts in the blog. Feel free to click links below to view the previous TLR based posts.

General Photography | London Through The TLR
Date Posted: Friday, 10^th September 2010

Travel Photography | Pisa, Italy
Date Posted: Monday 23^rd August 2010

So, keeping with tradition, early last week whilst I was in Dartford I decided to pop into Woods & Porter and that’s when I found out the last day of business on the premises will be Friday, 24^th of September 2010 [the intended date of publish for this post]. This saddened me slightly if I’m to tell you the truth. It puts the nearest camera shop [by my definition earlier in the post] in Eltham. This, in all fairness isn’t a vast distance to travel, but at the same the time it isn’t a commute that I would take in my spare time.

On the bus home that day I had the idea for this post. I wanted to document the store. Make sure that it would be remembered if that makes sense. So the next day I popped in and asked if it were ok if I popped back on the next Tuesday [21^st September 2010] and photographed the shop as a small documentary piece. The owner agreed and I went on my way.

On the Tuesday morning I had a baby photo shoot to do and I went to the shop at around 3pm and whilst taking the baby photographs I had the idea of expanding on my original idea and turn it into an interview as well. So that as well as photographing and documenting the shop I could also learn the history of the store which, now that I was aware of the store’s closure, became considerably more interesting to me. And so with my arrival to the store I asked if an interview was ok and he was ok with it. So from that commenced my very first [and hopefully not my last] interview.

The photographs in this post were taken with a Canon EOS 50D using a Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 lens as that was the camera and lens that I used earlier in the day. The interview is about 1,700 words and so I have made it a downloadable PDF which I will place just below this paragraph. The reason that I put it as a downloadable PDF was that I didn’t want the post to run too long. I have included 12 photographs with this post. As always you can feel free to contact me about anything to do with the blog or photography in general you can find how to do that on the contact page. Hope you enjoy the photographs.

Interview With Roger Woods – Right Click and ‘Save Link As’ to download the PDF.

EDIT: Sunday, 7th November 2010
I was recently informed that there were a few mistakes with the interview on the PDF file. With the spelling of some names. So I have corrected this and placed the new PDF below for download and I don’t really believe in masking over old mistakes so the old PDF will remain on this post for download. Please see link below. Thanks.

Interview With Roger Woods NEW

Portraiture Photography | Ashley Martin James

Whilst trying to sort out future portraiture sessions I thought it would be a good idea to show work from the past that I was proud of and so I contacted people that I had done portrait sessions with previously and asked if it was ok to put their image on the photography blog as back then I didn’t have a standardised model release form.

So as I was flicking through old portrait sessions and trying to find the people that I photographed on Facebook/Twitter/etc. I came across a set of black and white images that I took some time ago of a friend of mine called Ashley Martin James. Who as you may have guessed is the subject of this particular photography blog post. He has recently been making great headway in forming a music career for himself and in reply to my message as to whether it was alright to use his photos on this blog he said it was fine. He also mentioned that his studio had wanted some new portraits from him and has me to take them based on the quality of the portraits I took of him about two years ago. It was my first experience of night time portraiture and I think I did a good job. So I thought that I would place them on here.

As with the majority of my portrait sessions I remember most of the details. Quite a few of the photographs were taken on my Canon EF 28mm f1.8 lens and we had timed the shoot so that we would have a bit of time before it started getting dark so that we wouldn’t have to wait too long for night time to arrive.

Ashley had sent me over a few images of photographs that he wanted to emulate and so I started doing sketches and elaborating on the ideas. Keeping the ideals of what he had sent but keeping them in my own style. And we were both very happy with images produced. Bear in mind though, these were taken two years ago and I have improved tremendously since then. And with continued portrait sessions and constructive criticism from those who will give it I hope to improve furthermore. All the images in this post were taken with a Canon EOS 350D. That was my digital SLR before the EOS 50D. And the images were taken with a mixture of lenses. There were the Canon EF 28mm f1.8, the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 and the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8.

The reason that I used those lenses in particular was mainly due to the f numbers. The f number on a lens directly correlates to how wide the iris of the lens will and can open. There was a saying that my photography tutor recommended on memorising and he wasn’t wrong as it has helped me numerous times in the past and I have placed it below and in bold.

The bigger the number,
the smaller the hole,
the bigger the depth of field.

The smaller the number,
the bigger the hole,
the smaller the depth of field.

The number is the f number that you will see on the lens of any camera or camcorder that you will own or see in a camera shop. The number show on the lens is usually the largest the it can open f1.8, f2.8, f3.5 are examples. The hole mentioned in the saying is the size that the iris opens when you select your aperture. If you pick f22 the hole opens to a ratio of 22:1 to the diameter of the lens. And if you picked an aperture of f1.8 the hole would be bigger, pretty much the entire size of the lens. You can get higher that f1.8 but they get very expensive. Canon once developed a lens that was equivalent to f0.95 which would make the aperture larger than the lens itself and very bright. The depth of field [which you may see shortened to DOF on other websites] mentioned in the third and sixth lines of the saying refer to how much of the image is in focus. A shallow depth of field is preferable for portraiture as it means only the subject is in focus. If you were doing Landscapes [something I rarely venture into] then you may want to use f22 this will create a large depth of field getting everything into focus. I have only covered apertures and depth of field very briefly in this post and if there is demand for it I may go deeper into it on another post. As I’ve not even covered how aperture affects shutter speed and things like circles of confusion.

You may notice that some of the images are quite grainy. This isn’t grain, in digital photography it is known as noise. If it were film photography it would be called grain, that’s another thing to remember. The reason for that is because as it got later and light became somewhat scarce I increased the ISO of the camera and that increases the sensitivity of the CCD chip inside the camera allowing faster shutter speeds. Again I will not go into it now because that is a complete post in itself.

In this post I have included 10 photographs from the shoot and I have also included [below] links to Ashley’s Myspace if you wanted to listen to his music and a Wikipedia entry on Aperture. All the images in this post are in Monochrome or Greyscale. These are usually known as Black & White.

I like writing these posts where I actually write things that people can learn from as opposed to just telling you where and when I took the shots, which, I should mention to be honest. There were taken in Greenhithe in the November of 2008. As I finish writing this I would like to add that I am keeping myself busy, I was taking baby photographs this afternoon and straight after that I performed my first ever interview and photo session which I am going to try and get on the blog on Friday 19^th September 2010. As I am quite happy with how that went and I am just waiting for the film to be developed.

I would also like to add that I am still up for receiving constructive criticism on my photography. There are details on how to get a hold of me on the ‘Contact’ page. I hope you enjoy the photographs. If you have any comments that you would to make or you are interested in getting photos done yourself then you can either leave a comment on this post or get a hold of me via the ‘Contact‘ page. And please leave your comments. Always nice to know what people think of my work.

Ashley’s Music Myspace – http://www.myspace.com/officialashleyjames

Wikipedia entry on Aperture – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture

My Twitter account – http://twitter.com/squarebrackets

Impossible PX600 Instant Film Give Away [please read carefully]

[above image taken from http://moonflowerimages.blogspot.com/2010/09/impossible-project-giveaway.html ]

Until Thursday the 16th of September [in the next two days]. It seems that three [very] lucky people have the opportunity to win a pack of PX600 film. This film has been developed and manufactured by The Impossible Project and given to Rachel at http://moonflowerimages.blogspot.com. The rules are simple. She has three packs of film [all containing 10 shots] to give away. And if you comment her blog, tweet about the promotion or blog about it you have a chance to win one of the three packs of film. I have done all three. And I suggest that you make your way over.

There is one other way to put an entry in, but I don’t have a blogspot account so I can’t.

This film can be used in any Polaroid 600 camera and below I have included a link also to The Impossible Projects website. So that you can check whether or not your camera can take this film and also the kind of photographs you can expect to get from it. If you are reading this, that means you probably have shots that you have taken over the years with a Polaroid camera. If so, check out Polanoid.net. A great place online to display your photographs.

The Impossible Project
http://the-impossible-project.com/

Moon, Flower, Images Blog
http://moonflowerimages.blogspot.com

Polanoid
http://polanoid.net

I have been a massive user of Polaroid film and a big fan of it as you can see from looking at my bedroom wall below. (:

If I win a pack of PX600, which I’m not assuming I will because of the amount of attention this promotion will get. I will place the photographs on this photography blog. I’ll hopefully be placing some more material up on this blog in the next few days. It will either be Band Photography, Portraiture Photography or Wedding Photography. We’ll see.