The advantages and disadvantages of studio photography

The advantages of studio photography is that you have constant control over certain variebles including, lighting, background, props and weather.

This is good when you want a very clean white shot or with nothing in the background or if you want to take a light image at night or visa versa.
Another advantage could be that you have 100% control of everything. You can change the background, the lighting everything that you couldn't while shooting outdoors.

A disadvantage could be you can't quite create a natural looking background without going over the top. It will 99% of the time look artificial (which it is) and for some images this isn't subtable
Another disadvantage is that there is a huge learning curve with studio photography, from learning to control the lighting to getting the perfect exposure and so on

Overall using a studio can be good for a lot of things but you have to put a lot of effort into creating these images. For some images it is just easier to go out and shoot somewhere on location as oppose to in a studio.

Evaluation.

Firstly I am going to evaluate the brief its self. I did quite like the idea of the brief in making an image related to reflection. I liked how open you could be about the term reflection but also the guide lines of the 'studio' aspect of the brief.
Secondly  I will be evaluating the shoots that took place for me.
    Shoot number one was at a rollerblading competition called Slamm Jamm 16. I decided to use this as my first shoot as I thought it would be a very interesting and stimulating shoot. Also it would create a very good magazine cover for myself as i could gather inspiration from many other skate magazines. I believe the shoot went very well for me. I did only have one studio lighting with me and had to rely on that using my initiative with many in camera settings and my surroundings.
    The second shoot was using a projector to project images onto a white backdrop. I didn't think this shoot went as well as it could have as i was quite limited for time and the projections weren't that clear on the backdrop as the projector wasn't that bright. Overall this shoot went okay because i did fortunately shoot in raw and could bring back a lot of the image in post production.

Now I am going to analyse the final images I produced.

I really like the outcome of this magazine cover. I feel as though the experimentation with the text and layout of the text worked out in the end in that I ended up with an outcome I really liked. I really like the 'SJXVI' with the layer styles and overlay style added to give it a slightly transparent effect but with the drop shadow making it stand out more. The main title of the magazine I chose to do in red to keep with the overall theme of the image but I decided to make the red a lot brighter than the red in the image again to make the title stand out to the rest of the image. I also really like how the reflection of the beams across the top have created these guide lines to the image that draw your eyes to the subject of the image after looking at the title first.

A lot of post production editing had to go into this image but I do like the outcome. Firstly I had to do a lot of tweaking with the raw file to get the exposure correct. I then worked on the reflections and composition of the image. I then decided to add a little border to the image by adding a blur filter to the image. I did this because I thought it would round the image off well and provide more attention to the two reflection points of the image also drawing attention away from the quieter area's of the image like the models legs as it's just black pants. I decided to go with this image because the backgrounds busy and interesting and along with the reflections makes a very alive and vibrant image.








Overall I am quite pleased with how this brief went. If I was to do this brief again I would have experimented with real mirrors and reflections as well as a mixture of the two.

Evaluation of shoot one:

I think this shoot went quite well. I got a few images (more than shown here) I got all the images I need some of them where a little under exposed but I did shoot in raw so i was able to bring the image I chose into a good exposure level. I chose to do projections as I wanted to do a shoot with busier background so the reflections would look more interesting.

Here is a before and after comparison for the raw editing, I made the image a bit brighter as the projector wasn't bright enough. I then brought out a few more colours with the hue and saturation of the image and boosted the contrast.

I first created a duplicate layer in photoshop and flipped that layer horizontally. I then used the marque tool to select exactly half of the image.

I removed the selected area to reveal the layer underneath and merged the two layers. I then cropped the image to remove the black border that the projection didn't quite reach.
















I repeated the process as before and cropped the image slightly to make it more even.















To add something else to the image I decided to use a blur filter called tilt shift to add a little more attention to the centre of the image.

and finally i decided to boost the brightness just a little bit as fashion shots are generally very high key.

Visual Optimism is a fashion photography company that has done a lot of work with reflections. I think this will fit very well with my studio brief as I will be using digital reflections.
Here is a few examples of Visual Optimism.

 I believe they're using actual mirrors for the shots as you can see the edges of the mirrors and the lines aren't perfectly parallel. It also has a digital reflection straight down the middle. I really like this shot because of the use of both digital and real mirror reflections.

 This shot is just using mirrors and I do really like this shot too. I like it because for a fashion shot it works very well as it shows multiple angles of the same dress.

The shot on the left is using the same mirror set up as the first image by the looks of it. I also like this image because of the lines on the dress work well with the reflections and make guide lines leading up to the models face.







(Images from: http://visualoptimism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/upon-reflection-ava-smith-by-johan.html )

Final Magazine Cover.

I decided to re-arrange the text and layout to make the name of the magazine to stand out more and using a better font and colour that matches the image a bit better. Keeping to the same colour profile. 

For my first idea (skate magazine) I am going to use a studio style lighting (a flash gun) to fire shots of light at the subject and use some form of reflection using photoshop to create an interesting front page cover. I have already got the images using reflection and I'm going to experiment with different angles of reflection.

Irving Penn is an iconic fashion photographer and has shot many images for vogue magazine and for many celebrities  including Al Pachino. He's very famous for these kind of portraits but he also does slightly different and interesting portraits using camera effects

Photographer (Sam Cooper)

Sam cooper is a photographer that specialises in action shots (more specifically extreme sports) he often photographs professional skaters for big skate magazines like 'One magazine' his shots are often using a fisheye or a wide angle lens to capture the environment. He also uses large flash guns to light up everything and freeze the moment.

Post 1

For my reflections brief I am choosing to do two different subjects, one being skate photography and the other being fashion/portrait in the studio.

For my skate photography I'm going to photograph a couple skaters using flash guns and finding reflective surfaces that I can link to the brief.

For the fashion and portrait shots I'm going to be using the studio with different reflective props to create interesting and unique images.