My First Fashion Shoot in i-D Magazine’s Style: Doppel Identities

The inspiration for aesthetics came from magazine i-D, analysis of which was delivered here. The theme for fashion shoot  I chose was double identities. Or if in more particular, the glamour identity pulled over. The beauty and the fake of it. The manikin qualities overwrighting  organity.   

 

 

 

 

 I was responsible for art direction, photographing and postproduction . The mask is also made from before.

One soft light and white colorama was mainly used . Images were aestheticaly postproduced for atmospherical and mood change. 

It was an amazing experience to be a hptographer to find the aesthetics, find the  model, the props etc. By the end of the shoot I was really exhausted to my surprise.

CAPS: Research for Fashion Photoshoot: i-D

 The Magazine:

i-D is a British magazine dedicated to fashion, music, art, youth culture and

 different issues around the central theme of identity. i-D was founded by

designer and former Vogue art director Terry Jones in 1980. Over the years the

magazine evolved into a mature glossy but it has kept street style and youth

central to every issue.

 

Tipped on its side, the "i-D" typographic logo reveals a winking smiley. Most issues of i-D magazine have featured a winking cover model.

The magazine is known for its innovative photography and typography, and over the years established a reputation as a training ground for fresh talent. The magazine pioneered the hybrid style of documentary/ fashion photography called ‘The Straight Up’. At first, these were of punks and New Wave youth found on English streets and who were simply asked to stand against any nearby blank wall. The resulting pictures—the subjects facing the camera and seen from "top to toe"—are a vivid historical documentary photography archive, and have established the posed "straight up" as a valid style of documentary picture-making.

 

Photographers :

• Nick Knight,
• Wolfgang Tillmans,
• Juergen Teller,
• Terry Richardson,
• Ellen von Unwerth,
• Kayt Jones 

Analysis for Preperation:

The issues have developed but retained 'core mantra' : 'Originate, don't imitate'

Essentially it seems that there is a dominant light from one side and slightly from above, which is modeling the shadows. For shadows are gradient and soft, it must've been soft box light or beauty dish.  Also, face is lit the brightest, perhaps using white or golden reflectors.

The background is not overcomplicated, and grey or white colorama is used. Some pictures use ‘screen’ or postproduction techniques to partly obscure the image. Most of the times, models are dressed in bold clothing,often limited to black and white pallet. 

It can be noticed that the image is complimented with lots of geometrical shapes to tie the image together (For example a reflection of the mode on the wall, which reaches to the end of frame) and direct the eye of the viewer towards model’s face ( hand towards the face, décolleté as a frame for the face).

To keep the photo-shoot guided, I have gathered some pose references for the model from i-D magazine history images. 

 The pose references and Example images of i-D issue work as moodboards for the fashion shoot

To end the analysis, it seems that i-D’s shooting style and approach resembles that of Brassai’s : full of soft gradient light, tonal values. I’D’s photography quite often goes with desaturated or almost desaturated imagery.

 

  And one particular image of Edward Steichen:

CAPS: Product Shooting for Toys Brochure

Given the task to prepare several images for Toy company’s brochure had set particular challenges. It has to be visually engaging and appealing, and fit within commercial shooting standards.

 

To reach this , experimenting with product’s placement, lighting and techniques of postproduction was put into practice.

Lighting and placement:

For clean aesthetics and focused directing white colorama was chosen for the shoot. This has lead to a very ‘light’ , unencumbered images.

Placement of the product was put into a careful consideration for if the product was placed incorrectly, it  caused some  visual information loss. For example bear-toy and colorama had closely same tone and chroma values , therefore bear almost disappeared in images.

Donkey-toy was  to be used for contrasting.

 Another example was tricycle’s lamp: when facing studio lights directly they would bleach out any texture of the tricycles light bulb.

When Light angles and composition was set , this was the outcome:

For Lighting there was two lights used with one white reflector for softening of the shadows .

Postproduction:

Having reached 90% of the quality during the shoot, postproduction asked for minor tweaking of exposure, shadow intensity and colour tints. Some images benefited from slight increase of sharpness, clarity or noise values, for emphasizing fur on stuffed toy’s.

And the rest of images :

Analysis of Aesthetics for Product Promotion

This post is a homework task for CAP (Commercial Application of Photography)
We are learning a lighting set-ups for glamour advertising ,

the image above is my attempt to present newly-resleased parfume

 

two soft lights were used to set up the lighting: one from the side and one from the back. Exposure settings were matched to the light measurements taken off the object surface

A , which work is discussed here is Pixpecker agency

A company working on advertising, photo manipulation, retouching worked on Beer “Svyturys” promotion.

The end result is a painted still-life. The scrupulously built set included a sophisticated lighting set up .  Stripes of coloured paper were assembled on one reflecting sheet so to give a highly controlled colour reflections onto the product.

 

  

Key features:

Soft shadows,

Rim/contour light,

Emphasized light from side  

The decision to present the product as a traditional media painting adds a feeling for the brand to be coming from a traditional point of view and therefore familiar.

CAPC stands for Commercial Application of Photography for Creatives

It is a course run by Tonic at UCA and is an opportunity to have 15 lectures over 3 months. It is teaching the basics of photography for commercial application: product promotion, glamour portraits, fashion shoot .
More importantly, it is teaching  camera settings, use of lighting equipment, shooting indoors and outdoors etc.
One of this program's requirements is to keep notes and research for later evidence, which is nothing new for the CG course student. Therefore I'll be using this blog for storing the notes on lectures and progress. 

I'm  very much looking forward to these couple of hours a week, for the program is suiting my major project's brief: animated presentation of human character , which will benefit from getting some knowledge of  body presentation , studio lighting setups and so on.

Lecture 1/15: Introduction to Pre-history and Early Years of Photography:
 Interesting history of man's fascination watching image of reality instead of the reality itself and the attempt to create such system to capture the present.

One of the more interesting points was camera obscura - a light phenomenon to recreate the full image of the world if it is passing through a tiny hole. For example if all the windows were to be covered and only one small dot allows the light through, you would get the full view of outside two times bigger and upside down:

Or the daguerreotype photography, an early method for taking pictures at 1838. They would use a silver plate, which is reflecting as a mirror and  with special chemicals on, to expose to light and have someone sit in front of it for good 18 minutes for the image to 'bake in' and stay there. Every time the silver plate is exposed to light, it is at the same time reflecting and exposing the photographed image. The quality if it is somewhat very special, and the person feels almost alive in the picture.

More of such images can be seen at museum of the moving image

Other interesting topic was cameras.

Impressive SLR  camera Zenit, being an old pre-second world war creation still better than most of the digital cameras we have today.

And introduction to Haselblad camera phenomena. Swedish Haselblad cameras being so phenomenally good, that they are the only ones taken for NASA's flight to the Moon. Very surprisingly UCA too, has such cameras

Classes in the future should have some more hands-on experience.