This final
part of TAOP covers the skills needed to tell a story with both a set of
pictures and with a single picture. The
first exercise requires the development of a narrative picture essay using
between 5 and 15 images to tell a story of an event that has been researched
and the storyline planned. The
suggestion is firstly to develop an idea of what the story is going to tell
without thinking too much about potential photographs, so basically thoughts
around what happens before the event, during it, who the main players are, what
they doing and where they are going to end up. There is encouragement to ensure some variety
in the shots and give due consideration to frame orientation, distance and
close up approaches, use of different focal length lenses, use of colour and
single colours in images and finally to encompass a variety of lighting. Basically
it’s all about getting variety into the approach and immediate viewer appeal
into the photographs, but the images need to work together as a set so there is
an element of presentation skill built into this exercise as well as the images
needing to combine well into a set. Which
photograph is the most important image and whether it should be the first
and/or the largest photograph in the story is a challenge to be tackled.
I have
decided to tell the story of the design process and fabrication of a piece of
silver jewellery (elephant earrings) as this gives the opportunity for the exploitation of a number
of different aspects of the course so far as well as the opportunity to employ
different focal length lenses, lighting approaches and shooting strategies. I also plan to use this approach as my
assessment piece for this final part of TAOP so greater details of my thinking
and research of the location and what was about to happen will be included
there, so just in summary, the technical part of the shoot takes place in quite
a congested situation where I needed to get both my lights (can’t expect
someone to do this work with a flash going off) close to the action, although
the overall lighting was assisted by the presence of the white studio wall and
a silver heat reflector material on the ceiling. I wanted to avoid harsh shadows, so placed
the lights as close as I reasonably could.
Lenses used were a Sigma 100mm f/2.8 macro for the close ups and Canon
24-105mm f/4 L IS and 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS zooms for the longer shots.
Having taken my
images from the initial design brief that the silversmith was given right
through to the final article being worn, I needed to assemble these into an
appropriate order and decide on image size and how each photograph related to
others from the shoot in terms of constructing the narrative in this strongest
way. The images are initially shown in
sequence and I will then assemble them into a brochure style narrative to be posted at a later date. The 'background shot' will be used to overlay some of the other images in the final layout.
There is a .pdf version of a magazine type layout at this link.
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Background shot |
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Marking out |
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Attaching to silver |
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Drilling eye and hole to pierce out the ear |
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Cutting out |
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Making the hanging loops |
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Cutting loops en masse |
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Aligning loops for soldering |
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Soldering on the loops |
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Into the pickle for cleaning |
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Final barrel polishing |
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Boxed for sale |
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The happy purchaser
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Clear and very interesting. Nice to see one being worn as well.
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