Visual Exercise 4/ Final Project

I have never actually tried to do an exact recreation of a photograph before so this should be a really interesting project. I will admit, I am a bit of a perfectionist so recreating landscapes or doing anything outdoors is not an option for me. Only the studio will give me full control over lighting and composition. I still definitely want to challenge myself in this project by using both colour and black and white and multiple genres. However I don’t want to challenge myself to the point that the quality of my images suffer. The two genres I am most keen to do are portraiture and still life as they both lend themselves very nicely to the studio.

IMAGE 1

For my first recreation I wanted to do something simple to get me started. The first thing which came to mind was David Bailey. His simplistic black and white portraits often use simple frontal lighting and plain backdrops. Furthermore, he has been a huge influence to me since I first found his work. I often incorporate the same powerful simplicity which he is defined by in my own work. After a brief search through Bailey’s work I stumbled across this image; a portrait of Jack Nicholson with his face contorted:

Although I had been looking for a simple portrait to recreate, I liked the challenge this one presented. I also have a friend with an incredibly expressive face. I asked him if he would be up for it and he said yes. So I booked one of the studios at uni for the following afternoon and set about analysing the portrait so that I was ready for the next day. I concluded that I would need a single light positioned at 45 degrees from the right of the subject’s face. I decided that for the backdrop I would position a light behind it to over-expose it to make it plain white. I asked the subject if they could wear a leather jacket and a checkered shirt just like Nicholson’s. The next day I arrived at the studio, borrowed two LED panels and a tripod from the store and began setting up the image. I sat my friend down in a chair in front of a white backdrop and positioned the camera and tripod in front of him. I decided that for this shoot I would use my 50mm f1.8 lens as it is incredibly sharp and lets in a lot of light owing to the incredibly wide maximum aperture. I placed one of the LED panels behind the white backdrop and put it on full brightness. I then placed the other LED panel 45 degrees from the front of the subject’s face at a lesser brightness. I then set the ISO to 100 to ensure maximum sharpness, the aperture to f2.8 to let in plenty of light and the shutter speed to 1/100 to counteract the effects of the ISO and aperture to provide the correct exposure. At this point it was just a case of asking the subject to move their head fractions of an inch at a time until their face was lit up correctly. After about 10 minutes of tedious shooting we managed to get an image which is very close to the original:

Overall I am very pleased with the result. When reviewing it later on I did notice that there are a few areas where it differs from the original. Besides the obvious one which is that Jack Nicholson is a balding middle aged man and my model is a teenager, the subject’s collar should be closer into his neck on the right side, his face should be tilted slightly down and to the left and the upper left part of his lip should be lit up more. This might be nitpicking a bit however as otherwise the lighting and the position of the subject are almost identical. The subject is nice and sharp and in focus just like the original and correctly exposed too. One part which I am particulary happy with is the catchlight in the subject’s right eye.

Bailey’s photo on the left and my receation on the right. I didn’t do much in post; I just switched the image from colour to black and white, upped the contrast slightly and sharpened it to bring out more of the detail in the subject’s face.
I felt at this point I had proven that I could successfully recreate images in camera without doing much in post. I now wanted to put my photoshop skills to the test:

IMAGE 2

I decided that for my next image I would attempt to recreate a painting so I thought about some of my favourite paintings and one called The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo came to mind. It depicts the Biblical scene in which God breathes life into, Adam, the first man:

Obviously it would be near impossible to recreate the entire painting and it would take a great deal of photoshopping, so for this recreation I am just going to focus on the hands of Adam and God as it seems they will be a great challenge in and of themselves:

I decided that I would just have the outstretched hands against a plain white background. Similarly to the previous image, it appears very simple, even if the lighting is quite complex so I will need to really nail it. Owing to it’s minimalism I was able to take this photograph in my bedroom. I set up a white back drop with a lamp on it to over-expose it so that it was plain white and a second lamp on the left to light the hand. I then set the aperture to f4 so that all was sharp and in focus, the ISO to 100 for maximum sharpness and the shutter speed to 1/60. After this I began to shoot. What I found is that having a very shallow depth of field actually added to the painterly feel so I intentionally put the aperture down to f2.8 for a really shallow depth of field so that parts of the hand very blurred. I felt this created a really nice effect. This meant I was able to put the shutter speed up to 1/200, preventing motion blur of my hand. It was really tricky doing it by myself as I both had to be in frame and take the photographs at the same time so I used the canon app so that I could use my phone as a wireless shutter release. This made it a lot easier to capture the light whenever my hand was in the perfect position. After a few minutes of shooting I got a shot which I was happy with. It was now time to photograph the other hand so I could later stitch them together on Photoshop. However when I put my hand into position the light was completely different. It was at that point that I realised why I had found it so difficult to get my hand into the right position and get the shadows to fall in the right places. Clearly Michelangelo had not been painting true to life in terms of the light. He had created perfect light which did not exist so for the second hand I would have to reposition the light to get similar results. After a bit of tweaking I found a position above and slightly to the left of the hand were the lighting looked the same:

Obviously my hands are not as muscular as the hands in the painting as they have been exaggerated by the artist but I think that besides the shadows on the wrists I more or less nailed the lighting and the positioning. I think that my use of a shallow depth of field to blur certain parts of the hands definitely gives it a softer feel which make it seem more like a painting.

I didn’t do as much in Photoshop as I had first hoped to do. All I did was stitch the two hands together and change the saturation and colour temperature slightly to match the painting. For my next image I want to challenge myself creatively even more in Photoshop.

IMAGE 3

I was listening to some music the other day. When I was skipping through my songs the Queen II album cover came up. I’ve always loved how dramatic and majestic it is due to the lighting and the facial expressions of the band members. It really sums up the album and has inspired the way I have lit many of my own portraits. I instantly remembered the project and decided I wanted to recreate it.

What I found from researching the photograph is that it was taken by Mick Rock who was inspired by  black and white photograph of Marlene Dietrich from the 1932 Josef Sternberg film, Shanghai Express. I decided that I would do 4 separate self portraits and combine them on Photoshop as a similar technique was used to create the ‘Bohemain Rhapsody’ music video. I will need wigs and a leather jacket. I know there is a leather jacket somewhere in my house, however I don’t have any wigs and no one I know has the right kind of wigs that I could borrow. This means I’ll just have to go without as it’s not worth buying wigs as they are quite pricey and I would only be using them for one photograph. All I should need besides the costumes is my 70D with a 50mm 1.8 lens, a tripod, a single light which I will position above my head for all 4 photographs, a plain black backdrop and a shutter release cable. Like my last photograph I decided just to do this one in my bedroom as it meant I was not constrained to time and I wouldn’t have to trek out to uni. It also meant I would be able to play music. So with Bohemian Rhapsody playing very loudly in the background I began setting up the photograph. I put my desk chair in the centre of the room, put my camera on a tripod at the wall facing the chair. Behind the camera I placed a lamp which faced down towards my head. I then connected my phone to my camera via the canon app so that I could use it as a shutter release. I set the ISO to 100 for maximum clarity, the aperture to f4 to ensure all was in focus and the shutter speed to 1/60 to give the correct exposure. It was now, like the previous two images, just a case of tweaking the lighting and my position until it was perfect in each of the four photographs.

I stitched the 4 photographs together on Photoshop, using a transparent layer of the original as a template so that I could put each individual self portrait into the correct position. I then cleaned up any moles on my face as the band members are wearing make up (which I don’t have and wouldn’t know how to use) and added in the text “Queen II”before cropping it to a square so that it matched the original:

This time I was able to do a fair bit in post. As well as moving each of the 4 images into the correct positions, I upped the brightness and contrast levels until they were the same and then increased the reds and yellows. I think that it is very close to the original even if there are a few errors. With the exception of me having less hair than the band members, the eyes of the bottom face should be completely enclosed in shadow. There should also be a bridge of shadow joining the right face’s right eye to his hair. Also, the hands are a bit off in terms of their position. Besides this though the two images are more or less identical. I am especially pleased with the shadow on the cheek bone of the right face and the shadow on the nose and left side of the left face.

IMAGE 4

I had been struggling to find an image to recreate. That was when I looked at my iPhone and remembered the beautiful photographs Apple use to advertise their products. I brought up a picture of the model I have (the SE) and analysed it. Having seen Apple’s elaborate lighting set up somewhere before I knew I would need diffusers to create the soft light which characterises Apple’s product photographs. Lighting the apple logo so that half was lit up and half in shadow would be a challenge but I knew it was possible as I had seen this happen on my phone before. Also in the photograph the top of the phone appears to be lit up more than the bottom. Capturing this gradual change in light will only be achievable by having a soft light source placed nearer the top of the handset. I think the most difficult part though will be getting my camera lined up perfectly with the phone.

I decided to clean my phone so that I wouldn’t have to Photoshop out the dirt later. I placed the phone on top of a transparent box. Beneath the box I placed a light which I used to over-expose it so that it acted as a plain white background. I didn’t bother with a tripod. I wasn’t able to get the lighting perfect with the legs in the way. Furthermore tripods are not precise enough to get the exact position I needed it to be in. I placed a diffused light above and slightly more to the top of the phone to give that gradient-like effect I spoke about earlier. It also created the nice soft light which I attempted to emulate here. I then pointed a harsher light at the apple logo. It was then just a case of moving a piece of paper around with one hand to block out some of the light it emitted to get the apple logo half lit up. With the other hand I shot the phone with my camera set to an ISO of 100 for maximum clarity, an aperture of f1.8 to provide plenty of light (I didn’t need a deep depth of field) and a shutter speed of 1/100 to balance out the exposure.

The lights in my room are quite warm which resulted in a very slight orange hue to my image. I fixed this in no time by lowering the saturation slightly on Photoshop. I did attempt to fix it in camera but the colour temperature settings were not giving me the desired result no matter how few kelvin I used. There are probably more conventional ways I could have shot this as opposed to just using a few desk lamps in my room. I am still very pleased with the result though. I think that it is very close to the original. One problem which could easily have been resolved was that even with my ISO of 100, the conditions were quite dark so this still resulted in some slight noise. It could easily have been fixed by using brighter lights in the studio. It is barely noticeable but still something I could have improved upon. Furthermore, in the original, the camera of the phone has a blue flare on it. I was unable to achieve this in mine. I considered adding this in on Photoshop but felt it would be disshonest. In my photograph the dimensions of the apple logo and the manufacturing information are different sizes to the original. This leads me to believe that some tampering has been done in the original.

IMAGE 5

I decided that as well as portraits, I also wanted to recreate still life photographs. I browsed google images for still life photographs and came across this famous one by André Kertés. My lecturer, Caroline, had shown us some attempts from previous years. Well, challenge accepted.

What drew me to it the most though was it’s similarity to David Bailey’s simple yet powerful style. I liked the bold shadow of the fork and the texture on the table. I felt it would be simple to set up and light. The real difficulty would be making the micro adjustments so that it looks just like the original. Similarly to my previous recreation I analysed this one to make sure I knew what I was doing before I took it. I figured there was no need to book out a studio for this. I would just be able to do it at home. It was clear that the orginal was lit by a single light source which was high above and slightly behind the subject, perhaps a ceiling light. That night I put a fork and plate on top of a white piece of paper and positioned an anglepoise lamp behind it. The first problem I encountered was that the shadow of the fork was too soft. To fix this issue I brought the lamp up slightly higher. Like image 1 I used my 50mm 1.8 lens as I would need a very shallow depth of field so that the end of the fork is out of focus. I set the aperture to f1.8 for the shallow depth of field, the ISO to 100 to retain maximum clarity and the shutter speed to 1/100 to give the correct exposure. Like image 1 it was now just a case of making micro adjusments to the angle of the light, camera and fork until I was pleased with the results:

I didn’t do much in post. I brought the saturation down to remove any colours which meant I had to up the contrast so that it looked less flat. I then cropped it to match the dimensions of the original and cleared up a few bits of dust on the fork using a cloning stamp. I am quite pleased with the result. The shadows and objects are in the correct positions. The shadows are nice and sharp like the original. Unfortunately the fork and bowl I used are quite different from the ones in the original image so getting the light and shadows to fall in the correct places was really difficult. This means that in the shadow of the fork prongs only two are visible where there should be four because they are lost to the steepness of the bowl. Furthermore because of the 50mm lens being so zoomed into the subject I couldn’t get it at an angle where the edge of the table was visible. Aside from these two issues I think my image is a good recreation of the original.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion I think I have made 5 recreations which succesfully emulate both the lighting and composition of the works of more than 3 different artists/image makers. This project definitely taught me a lot about reading images and figuring out how they are taken. I can see this being an incredibly useful skill as I will be able to apply similar techniques to the ones I see in photographs to my own work. It has also taught me a lot of practical skills I can use in the studio in the future. I feel I now have a much better understanding of how light and shadows fall on people’s faces. I am pleased that I was able to handle the black and white images as well as the colured ones. Even if my images are slightly off in some areas I think that I have still proven that I understand how the images were orignally created and that I am proficient shooting using different lighting techniques and genres. 

FEEDBACK 

Having presented my images to the class, the teacher and my classmates gave me feedback on my work. My teacher pointed out the fact that image 4 is too noisy, wigs are lacking in image 3 and the shadows are a bit off in image 5 but aside from that all of the feedback was very positive. Allistar said that I maintained a good standard throughout all of my images and Louise liked the fact that I had recreated a painting as well as photographs.  

24 Hour Photo Mission: Ben Lomond

Hello, my name is Adam and I am a photography student at Napier University in Edinburgh. I usually get Thursdays and Fridays off so my friend Robbie and I decided to use this time to climb Ben Lomond. The only problem we faced was that Robbie works until 17:00 on Thursday and I start work at 10:30 on Saturday. This meant we had little more than 24 hours to travel all the way to Ben Lomond, climb it, pitch our tent, sleep, take our tent down, climb down, and travel home, all whilst getting the photographs we wanted along the way. To make matters worse it had been snowing there and the temperature was forecast to plummet below freezing. Despite this the Thursday night was also forecast to be clear and calm for most of the night with some nice mist the following morning – Perfect for taking photographs. 

With this in mind we booked our train tickets and got the 18:37 train from Waverley Station, nearly missing it because we spent too long getting snacks. We arrived in Milngavie at 20:44 and drove from the station to Robbie’s house to have dinner. We left at 21:50 for Loch Lomond, arriving at 22:30. Owing to the lack of light pollution, the sky was a bright blue and full of stars. The moon was so bright and the water so calm that a beautiful reflection of the stars and mountains lay on the surface of the loch. We stood there in the cold taking photographs for about an hour. Below, is one of the photographs I took by the side of the loch:

As we began to climb Ben Lomond we looked into the distance and noticed there was a great mist rolling in from the west. We climbed faster to escape it but it kept getting closer and by about 1000ft it had nearly engulfed us. We decided it was no longer safe to continue so we set about finding a spot where we could pitch our tent. We started to get worried as we couldn’t find anywhere flat enough and at this point visibiliy was no more than a few meteres. Thankfully, at that point we found a flat patch so we pitched the tent there in the hope that when the fog cleared we would get a good view over the Loch and the mountains. If not, we would complete our ascent when it was safe. The ground was quite marshy due to melted snow so getting the tent pegs to stay in the ground was a bit of a challenge. Despite this we were able to get the tent set up pretty quickly.

At 2am, shortly after we finished pitching the tent, the fog had cleared to reveal an incredible view out over the Loch. The fog in the distance really added a lot of drama to our images. We continued to shoot until around 3am when we decided to call it a night. We set an alarm for early the following morning so that we could catch sunrise. We awoke at 7.00 and to our disappointment it was dark and overcast outside the tent. As we were quite tired we decided to go back to sleep, waking up a second time at 9.00. The conditions had improved by this point and we decided to get up and start taking more photos. There was some really nice fog rolling over the hills and the wet ground was very rich in colour. Some gaps in the clouds created shafts of light which made for some really nice light on the mountains. The conditions were really great for landscape and perfect for portraiture:

At 11am we decided it was time to head down the mountain. We packed up the tent (which seemed to have doubled in size since we first unpacked it the previous night) and began our descent. Along the way we managed to capture plenty of stunning landscapes and portraits. It was really amazing seeing it all at day:

We arrived at the loch shortly before noon and took photographs there for an hour or so:

It was now time to leave. We drove back to Robbie’s house and had a late breakfast before driving home to Edinburgh. I slept for most of the journey so when we arrived back at around 4pm I decided to walk home from Robbie’s flat. I knew the 5 mile walk with my heavy pack would tire me out enough to get a good nights sleep before work the following morning.

At the end of the 24 hours I was pretty knackered but I felt really accomplished. I had climbed a mountain and taken some photographs which I can be really pleased with. Now Robbie and I are planning to trek along the West Highland Way (150km) at the beginning of January so stay tuned for a blog on that!