Experimental Photography

First Thoughts
The first thing I thought when this brief was issued, was quite frankly 'Woo-Hoo' this experimental brief allows me the freedom I want to create something, extremely interesting and creative, experimental photography is quite self-explanitory it really is just experimenting different types of photography. This brief allows me to create my own outcome, I can take any style of photography that I have been interested in and try out the more creative aspects of it, and truly play around with the boundaries of photography surrealism. To get started I searched different types of photography and selected a few of the ones which stood out to me, which were: Portrait, Advertising, Panoramic, Macro, Tilt-shift, Creative Editing, Strobe, Landscape, HDR, Long Exposure, Black and White, High-Speed, Smoke Art, Still Life and Night time photography. All of these techniques have been something that I have subliminally enjoyed when just accidentally viewing photos and would love to have a go at doing dome myself. With this brief I intend to break free from my comfort blanket of photo manipulation and really try something that I don't know too much about and just see if I can produce some excellent images. My first thoughts of this project were mainly just various types of photography that I could do, I have always wanted a brief with as much freedom as this brief and now that it has been set, my minds is coming up with different  ideas for what to do in my final images. Firstly I got this brief and thought that it would have to be very bizarre images when I read 'Experimental' I was quite worried however, upon researching this style I found myself quite excited about doing this brief. 


Research
For my final images I plan to choose 4 different styles, and take 1-2 images per style, I have decided to also do 6 different paragraphs for each style of experimental photography that I want to create.


As soon as this brief was set  forward I immediately starting researching different types of photography that I could experiment with, such as the ones I have previously mentioned, from the list of photography styles, I decided to chose a select few that I would enjoy trying my hand at and the first and the one I was most interested in was definitely most interested in trying was High-Speed Photography, I find this style very extraordinary and skilful, so I would enjoy trying out this type. High speed photography is photography which is photographed at very precise moments, creating some fantastic images, such as a water balloon being popped, and keeping it's form. This is helped by the aid of using a flash-gun so that you can stop what is going on in normal time. For this type of photography I want to do an image of a water-balloon to really show off the high speed aspect of the image, for my research on this I found this collection of images( http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=water+balloon+pop&m=pool&w=907335%40N22 )

This image really stood out to me because this was the only image in the entire set which was different, this was the only one where the photographer had placed a model in the shot and still captured the balloon bursting perfectly and still had brilliant exposure for the model. When I choose to take my image for this, I plan to do something different.

A second style of photography that I am interested in trying is advertising, such as arranging your lighting set-up and focal points to more compensate for the product instead of the model, which is something that I am not too familiar with however I am very interested in trying out. This style would force me to try out and experiment with other types of photography, I always enjoy a challenge and this is one of the reasons I picked this style. The best way I found for researching this style was to type in a brand name that I knew was fairly popular, and then search through various images until there was some more advertising themed photography. 

I found this image where it most looked like the photo was taken to emphasize the brand instead of a model's head-shots. In this the photographer has set up the lighting to be quite basic, with a soft box positioned to the left and above the camera to creat some nice soft shadows and to bring out the light on the logo. However when I choose to take my images I do not want mine to just be the standard model type shot, I really want my creativity to shine through.

My third style of photography I chose was Creative editing. I chose this style because this is the area I know most about but still want to try something different in this area, because normally I focus so much on the photoshop side of things that the original photography and lighting all go out the window, where if I combine all three then I am bound to have some stunning results, when thinking of creative editing my mind is automatically drawn to a photographer called Aaron Nace, however I have been inspired by his work many of times but in the occasion I want to make my images different to my normal style so I researched a photographer called: Erik Johansson. Erik, is a photographer who specialises in photo manipulation and photo retouching, and he is truly incredible at what he does. He is originated in Sweden and has just recently came into my  research and has already been a big aspect of the 'creative editing' side of this project. 

This image of a cooking accident is a brilliant example of the kind of stuff that Erik can create just with a camera and photoshop. When you look at this image you immediately think "Oh my god, he's cut his hand off" and when and image can give you that impression just by using photoshop well that really gives me hope.

Another one of my choices to research was, Black and White photography. I find this style can say more about a photographer when they only work with black and white, to see if they can really capture the essence of an image. A different reason I chose Black and White is quite simply because I find myself always working in colour, and this would be a task to see If I can push myself to just stick to Black and White. However black and white, is a vague style of photography, this can now be any of the styles above, but just put into black and white. Most of the inspiring photography was taken in black and white because in the older days colour printing wasn't available and I for one am very glad of this because all of the older photographers capture unreal images that I think would just look wrong in colour. 

This image was captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson and has been a favourite of mine for quite a while, I find that this, has been captured perfectly, I have seen in an article with Cartier-Bresson where he says that it was taken just behind a train stop and he had happened to be peering through a small gap at the exact moment when the guy jumped, he also says that the man was trying to reach another plank of wood which was just too wide for his lens. Brilliant.

Early Development


For my project I decided to start the advertising section of photography in my experimental project first, this is because advertising photography is something I have never tried before and was truly interested in testing. So I got right to it and I thought of doing images of shoes/trainers, because they are something that I actually like, and I like looking at different colours and shapes, so I got together the nearest relatively clean shoes and got to work.

This image was quite simple to take and it gave me quite a lot to think about when taking my final image, I love the use of out of focus carpet and background, however this was taken on f1.8 just so that the brand name would stand out very  clearly, I feel that If I dialled the aperture to something like f4 I would of still had some depth of field but still kept some more clarity in the shoes. I like the choice of an uncluttered background for this image too, just where the carpet meets the wall which helps you understand the camera positioning. 

This image was very close to being in the final images because I love the action and the fact that the subject has been frozen in mid air which makes the shoes which are the main eye attraction in the centre of the frame. The colours that I edited make a big impact on the outcome of the image with the purple shadows and yellowish highlights which contrast well. Another aspect in this photo which made it hard not to put in the finals, is the idea in the viewers mind that the model looks like they have been hung.

For my Black and White image I decided to take a photo which would kind of distort the viewers perception on the overall feel of the picture. This photo was taken in Blackpool at a giant disco ball they have near the prom, and I took this image at this angle which is the big barrier that hold the monument in place, but also kept a tiny bit of the ball at the lower left crop so that it kind of looks like a birds-eye view of a street with cobbled pavements, also the sky was perfect blue and white but I thought to be different I would shoot this in black and white so that it adds another illusion aspect.

Here is the shot I took for my creative editing part of the experimental brief, I took this image using one main light source witch was a flash-gun, bounced, on full power to really illuminate the room/subject. This edit was something I was quite familiar with doing witch is creating lots of various layers and playing around with the curves on each layer, I was very pleased with the end result however this didn't make it into the final images section mainly for the fact that I am too familiar with this technique of editing so I decided against including it because I want to challenge myself more.

For high-speed photography I knew that I was going to take picture of balloons bursting because I have done it before but with bad equipment and really wanted another go at it now with some form of high speed lighting. This was a photo that I took a while ago of a balloon bursting so I decided to incorporate it into my project however I really hate the grain that I have on this image and also the background in this image isn't particularly exciting, however I did get this image quite spot on seeing as I had around 3 attempts of getting it right. I really look forward to trying this again and getting it perfect.

Final Images

Advertising

Black and White

Creative Editing