About

This shoot was inspired by my artist reference, David Llada, who take photographs of players during a chess tournament. I aim to show focus and concentration through my photographs in order to display how we observe the game while coming up with strategies.

I took this shoot at home, creating a small game set up while making sure to keep a blank background to make my friend the main focus of the image. In order to capture her natural expressions we ended up playing a small match against each other, which i found also helped to make the set up of the board game look more realistic.

Images

Edits

Best photos

I turned this image to grey scale as it helps to highlight the light and darkness of the image, bringing our attention to the playing pieces. I also am fond of the body language presented in this image, with her head in her hand suggesting that shes stumped as to what move to make while her other hand is preparing to reach out and move a piece.

Similarly to the photo before, I think that this image displays her body language really well, conveying across to the viewer that she’s concentrating hard on what move to make next. Additionally, I am fond of the composition of the image and the way that it was taken from a slight angle, making it one of my best images overall.

Lastly, I think that this image provides us with a good idea of what its like to observe, seek and challenge through chess with her body language once again showing how she is observing the game in front of her. The more determined look on her face also suggests to us that the game is difficult but she is still looking for a way to win.

Selection for Editing

green- will edit, yellow- might decide to edit (if more edits are needed), red- won’t edit

Editing in Lightroom

I increased the contrast, texture and clarity of the image, after making it black and white.

Final Edits

I think these edits are effective, as the black and white causes the photos to look sharper and not be as distracting. My inspiration, Matt Emmett, mostly created coloured images but I still think the overall style of the pictures is the same.

After the editing process, I ended up with 145 images from the shoot.

Most of these images didn’t need as much editing as some of the other images in this project.

Some of my favourite images and their settings:

I will present my images in a handmade photobook instead of a Blurb photobook as I feel that this will create a more personal and nostalgic feel. I will stick in my physical prints using photo corners.

Therefore, I will need to make my final selections soon so I can print everything and purchase the appropriate book. I will print the images about A6 size and arrange them variably on each page in the centre of each.

In order to decide the order of everything, I am going to arrange all my prints in various orders on a table so I can see what looks best and in what configuration. I plan to arrange the images in separate cities, as they often have similar colour themes across each, and perhaps with cover pages in between that I can customise.

Small World by Martin Parr

I have drawn comparisons between my work and that of Martin Parr’s project Small World (published 2007). This book explores tourists in an affectionate case study of their stereotypes and intricacies.

Some of my images have a similar colourful and playful aspect to them I feel, and capture similar subject matter.

Therefore, I intend to replicate the simplicity and colours of his publication in my photobook, as I think his images are intriguing and endearing.

Life’s a Beach by Martin Parr

I am also going to take inspiration from Parr’s 2012 publication Life’s a Beach, as he uses photo corners in this book to make a more homemade and rustic feel.

The book is also created with the Japanese stab binding technique, which adds to this, seen below.

I wasn’t very happy with the outcomes from shoot 3 as I didn’t have a zoom camera to capture action shots. It was also a training camp so their were heats going on so I only had a short window to capture my sister on a wave. I ended up taking more landscape images.

I decided to edit these images in black and white as I wanted to try recreate some old retro surf images.

I cropped this image as I didn’t like how there were extra people on the side and thought it would suit the composition better if it was just the group of people within the image.

final images

For my third photoshoot, I am going to go down to St Aubins and photograph various things to do with the harbour, as well as houses around there are there are more built up areas that will be different from other parts of the island. I also think that the architecture in that area is less modern than other places which will link to my project more.

inspiration:

I managed to take a small amount of images in town and I think they aren’t as good as I would like. This was because of the lack of crowds around. I plan to go out and take more images in other locations such as St Ouen’s bay and Corbiere lighthouse.

I began by placing a download of this page of his book in Photoshop. I am going to place my images over his as a practise run to see if I like the design with my archives.

I wanted to use coloured images, similar to Sultan. His images have some subtle vibrancy so I chose to include coloured images with similar colour tones.

To create this I took the size of the images Sultan had used, and cropped mine to that size. I then organised the images into place and added a slight shadow down the middle to make it look like the book still.

I want to vary the images, and include some of my gran too because I feel like it may be too centred around my grandfather.

I like this although I prefer the collage of my grandad, I am going to incorporate my gran in a different layout of Sultan’s.

I like this collage because it shows the change in time quite ambiguously. There is a young image of the grandfather, then my gran slightly older, then I contrast the portraits with a landscape. It is a picture of the gardens where my grandfather passed, show it unobviously presents the loss of him and change that time causes.

I also like the way he lays out his writing, and I have created some rough ideas on how I am going to incorporate this into my photo book to add context to my grandfather’s life. He owned a car garage and a boat business and kep scraps from the newspapers. I have edited some of these in photoshop in a similar way to Sultan.

Some of the backgrounds were yellowed newspaper, so in Photoshop I lowered the saturation, increased the brightness and contrast and then pasteurized it. I then readjusted the contrast and managed to make the writing stand out on a white background. They didn’t fully fit the shadowed page I am experimenting on but it is a rough idea.

I focused one of these on his boat company and the other on his car garage company. I chose to include archives of my gran and an old car. I think they compliment the composition and are subtle, similar to the ambiguous link between Sultan’s images and his archived.

I created another idea, completely focused on archival material from his scrapbooks. I used a similar font to Sultan because I find it quite retro looking, linking into the overall look of the archives.

For this layout I included dialogue that I took from a recording of my Grand talking about my grandad’s interest in the hawthorn bush. I don’t like this layout because I think the composition isn’t right, and the images on the right don’t connect to the dialogue.

I quite like this layout, and it has given me ideas about naming the book ‘Holiday in France April 1989 Eric and Jo’. If I don’t I think I will use the same front or writing style for it. I quite like this as an opening page.

I quite like this basic composition as a page because the images are so colourful they make the page spread simple but interesting. I think if I did a page like this I would only do 1 or 2. I would put my new images after it such as this one because it presents a juxtaposition in the situation.

I put some example text next to it and like the look of it. I will need to record more dialogue of my gran to do this.

Overall, there aren’t many images that I have selected from this shoot due to the emptiness of the city in the early morning. However the morning light meant that sharp shadows and silhouettes characterise these images. Therefore, when editing these, I decided to use Black and White and increase contrast for the shadows. I think these are strong images, however, there are very few, meaning there is less likelihood that I can use them.

The original image is strong, however I wanted to use the extreme contrast between light and shadow and the intensity of these shadows to create a dark and moody image.

To do this, I used a black and white filter and increased contrast, vignette, and texture. I am happy with the outcome and applied similar settings to the other images.