Film Noir (cont'd)

During our shoot-out event I also took the opportunity to make photographs of the girls individually.   These were some of my favorite images I made.

In this first image I used only natural lighting.  This was a hallway on the outer wall of the event center that had light streaming in from a few different areas.

In this second photograph I was using a friend's speed light in a completely dark room.  I was pretty impressed with how well my model was light with the speed light. 

This photograph was also made in the outer hall stairwell utilizing only the natural light that was available.

In my image of my modeling singing I did use studio lighting to light my model.  

More natural lighting on my model in the outer stairwell.

Film Noir

Each year my program, Spokane Falls Community College, rents the Riverside Event Center and we students, along with instructors, are able to do some real location photography.  The goal is to give us the opportunity to use our creative vision to create various photo shoots, all ranging from large production to small production shoots.  My friend, Cory, and I arranged for two large production shoots.  We find models for these shoots, use a hair and make-up school to get our models all ready, and even have to put out costumes together.  Thankfully we have the assistance of our local Civic Theater that guides us with our costumes.

The second of these shoots was a film noir type image.  Cory headed up this shoot and I assisted.  We had a lot of fun capturing these, but it was a process for sure!  We recruited three of our fellow classmates to model for us, along with my daughter.  Our vision was a male piano player with three femme fatales vying for his attention.  The photo below is one of the images I captured in-between shots that Cory was taking.  We were getting all set up while we waited for our final lady to finish getting her hair and makeup done.

In addition to working with Cory for the group large production image, I wanted to take advantage of the lights to capture some other images I had in mind with our ladies.  I have a friend who has a 3D printer and asked him to make me an old time microphone (if you want more info on this let me know and I can connect you with him).  

These images are a start, I know I still have much to learn, but I enjoyed working on them!

Digital Composite

During my first quarter of photography classes we learned how to do digital composites.  This quarter we are also doing them in our photographic design class.  I’m getting more comfortable with doing these.  While I don’t intend on doing a lot of digital composites they can be fun, and I can see how I would utilize this skill for doing the digital scrapbooking that I would like to do.

For this class we were instructed to choose one from four different artists and their movements to emulate for this project.  Our group chose Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, a film noir style painting created in 1942.  To accomplish this project we needed to photograph each person in our group of five separately, shoot a background, and other supporting objects/subjects, to composite into our final pieces.  Each person had to create their own individual composite plus we had to create one group composite. 

 After researching film noir we decided that our characters needed a story that would all tie together in the final composite.  This storyline was essentially that some characters were married and that they were all cheating on one another, and in the end one of the characters would have died, but no one would be able to tell “who done it” because every one of us could have been guilty.

In my group individual composite (below) three of our characters walked up on two of the others who were married, but the two of them had been cheating on two of the other characters that had just walked up.

 

In our final group composite, one of our characters ends up dead.  Two of the women look smug, the other woman is sad because he died, and the last man is nonchalant.  Can you depict which of the characters has killed the man?