I shot my photos for PB3 today, sunday the 30th of April. The subject of my photo essay had a very busy schedule, and this was the only date she was available to shoot. I’m currently in the process of editing my photos in Lightroom, and I’m generally happy with how they’re looking. The subject, Joanne Ludbrook, was very friendly and comfortable in front of the camera, which was super helpful. Joanne is a seamstress who has a studio in Eltham at Monsalvat. Monsalvat is an artist’s colony which was built in the 1930s, but the architecture is in a french provincial and gothic style. The grounds are also huge and made up of lovely gardens. I’d been to Monsalvat onec before for a family wedding, so I was excited when Idya suggested Joanne, because I knew that Monsalvat would be a really interesting and unique place to shoot this photoessay. Because I’d been there before, I decided to meet Joanne at Monsalvat on my own, instead of going with Idya, because the shoot was the day before the project was due and I knew that Idya would be busy working on her own photos. There was a festival/event happening at Monsalvat while I was shooting the photos, which meant there were a lot of people around, who would come into Joanne’s studio (there’s a sign on the door which says please come in) or come up to us during the shoot. This was fairly time consuming, because I couldn’t really shoot any photos inside the studio whilst there were other people in it, because it was small and I didn’t want any other figures in the shots. At the same time, it was actually really good to have some other people around who could talk to Joanne whilst I was taking the photos. This meant that some of the photos looked less posed because she was mid-conversation. In some of the photos I shot she is talking to someone she knew, and I like how natural her facial expressions are in this photo, and how you can sense the familiarity.

It’s a bit frustrating that the shoot had to been done so close to the projects due date, because it means I have to edit the shots and do the last blog post very late. Because of this I’m going to finish this blog post tomorrow (monday the 1st) after I’ve edited more of the images, because I’m in the early stages of that now.

Monday:

I just finished editing the eleven photos that I’m submitting for my photoessay, and in general I’m happy with how they’re looking. My main issue with the photo essay is that not all photos are equally strong. Whilst I really like some of the photos, others aren’t particularly interesting, but feel like I have to include them in order to have enough photos, and to set up the context of the images. In hindsight, I should’ve approached the shoot with a clearer idea of certain images I definitely wanted to capture. For example, I knew that I wanted a photo of the subject leaning against the doorframe of her studio, so I took a lot of images like that, and ended up with a few I was happy with. However, I didn’t think to take a wide shot of the studio, which would’ve been a good image to start the photoessay with. Because of this, I didn’t take many wide images of the studio, and had to use one that was sufficient but not quite right. This image is the first one in the essay, which I don’t mind visually, but it doesn’t actually have the subject’s name on the sign (even though it’s also her studio), which is a shame.

My DSLR camera is a pretty standard model, and the lens is very unexceptional. I had planned on borrowing a lens from RMIT to shoot this project, however when I tried to borrow one for the weekend, all the Cannon lenses were already booked out. Next time I won’t wait til 4pm on a Friday afternoon to borrow equipment. I was really fortunate, however, because my step-mum is a photographer and when she heard that I hadn’t been able to borrow a better lens for the shoot she let me use her camera. It’s a Nikon D800 which had a really good zoom lens on it. It was pretty easy to use and so superior to my DSLR in terms of image quality. Because of this the images required less editing than I used in PB2,when I used my regular camera. I edited all the photos in Lightroom, and found that the most important and difficult part of editing was making sure that all the photos matched in regards to colour, exposure, contrast etc.

I didn’t edit my photos much, i mostly just adjusted the contrast, exposure and vibrancy.

Here are a couple examples of images before and after editing:

before:

after:

before:

after:

The difference isn’t huge, but I used Lightroom to make the pictures warmer and more vibrant, which I think makes the photoessay more unified.

I think I was really fortunate to have Joanne Ludbrook as the subject for this photoessay, because she was very comfortable in front of the camera, and the photoshoot was not particularly awkward at all, which I was quite surprised about. I don’t think that I’m terrible at communicating with strangers, however it’s not my greatest skill or something I particularly enjoy, so it was great to have a model who made the shoot and the interaction easy.
This project has taught me that I shouldn’t leave the largest portion of a project til right before it’s due, and instead should’ve organised the shoot earlier. As I work three days a week and have uni four days a week, it was difficult for me to allocate time during the day to do this shoot, particularly since it had to work for the model as well. However, since I’m aware of my busy daytime schedule, I potentially should’ve chosen a subject who I could shoot at night, like a musician or someone who works at nighttimes.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realise until Monday the 1st at 4pm that the photos were due at 12pm. I had thought that they were due at 12am. This is the second time this semester that I’ve handed in a project late because I got the time that the project was due wrong. It’s defiantely something I have to pay more attention to and hopefully not do again, because it’s incredibly frustrating and a pointless way to loose marks. Ideally I would’ve had my project finished before the due date, and wouldn’t have to pay such close attention to the actually time that its due.

Broadly speaking, I think this project was interesting and challenging in regards to pushing students out of their comfort zones and making them produce a larger body of work than we did for PB2. This project had made me feel more comfortable in doing a photoshoot with someone that I don’t know, and more aware that a really need to work on my time management skills.