Evaluation

Throughout this project, I've researched a number of different things to provide possible inspiration for the eventual construction of my own final outcome. The first artist I looked at was John Rankin, the acclaimed fashion and make-up photographer. I'd briefly looked at his work when we were studying portraiture last year but I never made a page about him, so I thought it would be nice to look more into him and see how his work fits the brief 'Fantastic and Strange'. I found his work very interesting, I loved the way that instead of taking regular beauty shots, he turned the make up into it's own art form. To me, the colours were particularly interesting because they were never subtle. There was always some sort of clash or 3d element to the colours which drew the eye to the photo immediately. This inspired me to experiment with colour in lighting.
The next artist I researched, and probably the most influential on my final piece, was Me&Edward- particularly his Metamorphosis collection. I loved the tones of his work, the neutral hues of pinks and beige's which reflected the content of the photographs as well as complimenting the foreground. Me&Edward is also a 2D&3D graphic designer which meant he could create beautiful additions of the body like the tail and protruding spine of some of his images. The thing that inspired me most about Me&Edward's images was the way he manipulated them so far that they almost breached the wall of human into something else, his work is really interesting and pleasant to look at and I think you can definitely see his inspiration in my final piece.
I also looked at Jacques Dequeker, and his fashion photographs of Paolla Rahmeier. The main thing that I liked about these photos was the effect he'd given them which gave them that 3D-without-3D-glasses feel. I really liked this and it was really cool trying to figure how to mimic the effect on my own images. When I finally did, I was happy with the effect, it looked almost glitchy and I thought that was something stramge and new that I hadn't looked at before. I decided to incorporate in into my final piece but only in sections, so I took shards out of the body and within the shards I altered the channels to make the effect, this adhered more to the glitchy feel and also gave a sort of glassy look to it which I liked.
After Dequeker, I looked at Annette Messager's hands series. She took photos and then drew onto them which was interesting, I especially liked the effect it had on black&white photos because the contrast between the squashed, black and white hands, and the bright colours was nice and even gave something of a narrative to the pictures. I was going to incorporate the drawing idea into my final piece but decided it detracted too far from the natural minimalist feel I was going for, so I decided just to keep the wrinkles but enhance areas so that they looked more pressed against something, as seen in Messager's photos.
The last artist I looked at was Eliza Bennet, an artist who's work I appreciated for it's focus on the formation and appearance of the human body. I loved the way she made sculptures to highlight the curves and bones of a human, and one of my final pieces was greatly inspired by how she made the spine stand out so clearly, it linked well to my developing theme of focus on the human body.
Other than artists, I also looked at some cultural references, for example: the use of colour in film posters. From this research, I focused quite a lot on the colours in my final photos to aim for a colder temperature in some, and a natural pinky tone in the others which is also present in Me&Edward's metamorphosis series.

During this experiment I experimented with a number of different things. The first thing I experimented with was coloured foil, I did a photoshoot using a spotlight and uses coloured acetate to tint the lighting. This produced a really cool effect and it was interesting to find different manual ways of altering how a photo came out without even using photoshop. I also experimented with wax. Unlike the foil, this was a post production experiment where we took photographs and placed them in teabags before dipping the teabags in wax which solidified and created an old, vintagey feel. I also experimented on Photoshop, looking at different filters, adjustments and ways to edit. I was playing around with double exposure and decided to incorporate it into my final piece as well as finding out that using a black to white gradient map creates a really contrasty black&white, I used this on my black and white photos in my final piece. Based loosely off of Me&Edward, I experimented with Photoshop, looking at eye pulling. Eye pulling is really cool because it reveals what's underneath the eyelid and gives a burst of red in the photo. I edited by taking two photos and then merging them together to remove the photo with the hand which created the illusion that the eye was drooping rather than being pulled. I used this effect on one of my final piece photos. I also used the magnetic lasso and clone tools in my final outcomes, especially on the photo with the back where I needed to super-impose multiple hands. I also played around with the channels to create the 3D effect. Finally, in my final piece I did a multiple exposure piece; this took some experimentation because I the change in blending modes also changed the darkness/brightness of the image which created problems but I figured out a way to compromise and fit all of the images together in the end, with help from the opacity changer and eraser tool.
I'm more or less happy with the way all of my photos turned out. There's a healthy balance between natural, minimally edited photos as well as clearly heavily edited ones. I decided to use 4 out of 6 of my ideas because I couldn't decide, as well as adapting one and adding another. Rather than doing two double exposure photos, I decided to make one show inspiration from Jaques Dequeker because I really enjoyed his work and thought that the mix of black and white and colour would be a good mid point between my completely monochrome or coloured photos. Initially, I wanted to include a theme of the colour orange and butterflies but as I edited my ideas adapted to be more related to skin, hands, and bodies. For example I was going to put butterflies on the shoulders of the photo of the back but ended up putting multiple hands, I felt it fit the brief of 'Fantastic and Strange' better.
  To take my photos I used a 40mm pancake lens in order to get the right depth of field for my photos.  I used a rotolight on some of them to illuminate areas without having to turn the flash on and create a softer, more natural effect. I edited them on photoshop using tools like the clone tool, lasso tool, changing the colour channels, using different filters and adjustment, and more. Here are some screenshots from my editing process:









I presented my final piece in a little card book that I coated in black chalk paper to hide the preset pages. On each page I put one of my final piece pictures accompanied with an object from the human body to further link my project to 'Fantastic and Strange'. I then put other photos from my final photoshoots on the outside of the book.
Here are some photos of my final piece:

I was pleased with how my final piece turned out because if fit the image in my head, which was quite minimalist. As I made my project I changed aspects of it, like changing butterflies for hands, to better fit the project.