Preperation & Shoot for Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter Portrait Shoot.....

I asked my friend Claire Bache to attend as a model as she is a make up artist and fantastic at doing different looks.  She is also very comfortable in from of the camera and this is what I wanted to make the experience run as smoothly as possible.

So we arranged a date and booked some studio time and then I started to think about what I wanted my pictures to look like.....  I did some research on the sort of shots I wanted to get out of my time in the studio but also started to think about putting my twist of the seasons on to each theme.  (Please see researched photographers....)

I decided to split the seasons in two.  Autumn & Winter and Spring & Summer.  I decided to do Autumn & Winter first.....

So I started thinking about the seasons and what people associate with each one.  I did a bit of survey to get peoples thoughts.... The results are as follows:

Winter

Christmas trees and decorations

Cold

Hat, Scarfs and gloves

Presents

Halloween

Skiing

Autumn

Wind

Leafs

Getting dark

Summer

Seaside

Shells

Sun

Sunglasses

Warmth

Spring

Flowers

Easter

Colours

So I decided to use Christmas decorations to represent the Winter party time.  Autumn I took along some leafs I gathered from my garden.  Summer I used shells, sun umbrella and the lighting in studio to represent the sun. And finally I used flowers and colours for Spring.

I asked my model to bring a selection of clothes for each season and went through before what would look good together.  We also discussed make up and what sort of look I was looking for within he image but left the technical side to her as she is the professional after all...

Even though I was working with someone who is comfortable in front of the camera  I wanted to make sure we were going to be covered for different ideas reference modelling poses.  So I took along a fashion magazines and also printed some poses off different websites by just searching model poses in to google.  These did end up being quite handy at the start to get thing warmed up... But then things started to come quite naturally after a little while.

Coming in to the studio the following week to do the Summer & Spring shoot were similar but obviously with different clothes and different make up and different props as above....

I used the wind machine as an effect for Autumn as well and did use on each Season to see what would look good....  I used some props from the studio as well such as tables, chairs, flowers, suitcase, telephone and different coloured cloth.

I used my own personal Canon 20D camera for all of the pictures.  I used a tripod sometimes when I felt necessary.  I kept my ISO at 100 so I would get a good quality fine finish and adapted my f stop and shutter speed to vary light and sharpness.  I tried to use as many different depths of field and angles as possible to get a good choice of images so I would be happy with my final shots.  All pictures were taken with a standard size lens....

Within the studio I think I made use of the space quite well, with making sure the lights were not getting too hot and that props were put away safely after use and when altering the lights i.e brightness, position that I always considered health and safety of me and my model at all times.

My main aim with my pictures were that could be found in any fashion magazine in the supermarkets today.  I wanted to use up to date looks and the feel of high end fashion.

I took around 20 frames for each season and first picked my favorite and then whittled it down to 3 from each with a total of 12 shots for my final Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter Portrait theme.

The reason I picked my final 12 to be my final 12.....

Overall I decided on my final 12 because each image was a little different from lighting to props and model poses.  I felt the clothes and make up along with camera work made each image believable as a high fashion image in each season which was my aim at the start of the project.

My first time in the studio....

My first time in the studio was a little overwhelming.... It was as i imagined it to be with the white walls and lots of lights!  I used the college camera which was Canon which was good as my personal camera is a canon. 

Steve did the orginal set up with the lights and gave us a talk on health and safety i.e how the lights get hotter the longer they are on and to be careful of the wires and props when moving around the studio.  We used different types of light to get different effects, from spot light to soft light to overall lights.

As you can see we just used simple objects from within the studio.  We used the brown wood as a base and each took it turns to shoot the objects.  I used the 'tripod' to do long exposure shots and set my ISO to 100 and adapted my F stop and shutter speed to get differnet kinds of shots.

We did then go on to doing some portrait photography using each other as models and getting used to having ideas ising props etc and got quite in to by the end and got me inspired to get in there and do some of my own stuff and start planning on what I would do while in the studio.  It got me thinking about what props, lights and what sort of pictures I hope to get out of my studio time!