Studio Work for Pastiche

Once I'd decided on emulating Neil Turner's photograph of the MP John Redwood, I had to find a model who would be willing to let me photograph them. I used a friend of mine who is taking the Performance and Media course at USW so they're used to being in the spotlight, although this turned into a 3 hour photoshoot as he wanted to use some of the photos to go into an online portfolio. I've included all of the photos taken - good and bad - in this post as part of a contact sheet just to show the range of poses and the couple of different lighting techniques I used. Although, considering not all of the photos are relevant to the pastiche, I only annotated the images that were. These are my contact sheets of the shoot.

I used the shot that I circled in purple, and edited it in Photoshop. I found that in some shots, either Jack's face or his hand would be in focus, not both. This may be due to a combination of the lens I was using and the distance between the light hitting his face, and the light hitting his hand. I decided to shoot the photograph from various angles to get a photo that not only best matched Neil Turner's image in terms of lighting, but that also ensured that Jack's face and hand were in focus. The light had to hit the side of his face and his hand in just the right place in order for the photo to be a good copy, and the composition also had to be very similar. Although his leg isn't as high as John Redwood's in the shot as we found that he must have been very flexible to have his leg up by his chin. Either that or he was in a very low chair, whereas we had a stool to use as a prop. Overall I think the photoshoot went successfully, and I found that I didn't need to reshoot as I had spent quite a long time preparing for the shoot by researching the lighting I needed, and after a few stops and starts I finally got it right. This is why the first few photographs are not very good in terms of lighting and possibly focusing in a couple as they were test shots to see if the lighting was right. After altering the ISO to make it lower, the lighting was just how I wanted it. If I tweak the final image a little on Photoshop, I don't think I will need to reshoot the pastiche. I also took a few shots on my iPhone, to emulate another photographer called Rankin.