The Final Show

At 10pm last night I got my images back from the printer. I didn't want to look, my partner did and she said they were good. Bit I didn't notice her going WOW so I decided to wait until Friday.

Friday, here they are and once they were on the wall I was impressed. I had come a long way from when I started.

Just when I thought it was all over

Having spent hours yesterday doing all the work to be ready for print, today I could relax and work on the word document for my presentation. BUT, and I say a big but, I decided to show people the filtered version of my images (the ones I am NO going to print).

To my dismay they loved them and I was faced with the decision, do I panic to try to redo the images I had already packaged up, with only 5 minutes to cut off?

Of course I like a challenge so I raced home, found the original images, applied the filter and after setting up  a drop box (something I had not done before) I had them uploaded and ready for Delwyn to get for printing. I sent an email and by the end of the day she had them and I could once again relax...

Life is not meant to be easy, and as Niki said, you just have to relax into it.. Either that or go crazy.

Its all about the story, and sequencing

To tell a story their needs to be a beginning, a middle and and end. The images you saw on the last post are not in story mode, the way they will be displayed in an exhibition is something you will have to wait to see..

Final touch Up

The final steps before the images can go off to print, sharpen each image. It makes a difference, especially in the fine detail of some of the cloth. Make sure my colour across the images go together. There was a little   touch up work with the two images of the doll with the jump suit. A final review of the images zoomed in for any imperfections that need removing. Of course sometimes an imperfection is best left in, and some I did. Are all the images the right size, is the colour space the same (1998 Adobe RGB) and the resolution.

Yes I am happy they are all ready for print. A renaming to make sure my name is associated with each images and save as TIFF without layers and I am good to go. All that's left is to write up the presentation for Friday, oh and think of a title as I don't like the original so watch this space.

Here are the final selection of edited images that will be printed.

Of course I had to have a little play with some filters and came up with a look that I quite liked, but in the end I decided they were going to look better printed without the filter.

Here are the images with a bleach bypass filter added.

So what do you think...

Spots and clones - the art of touch up

I have learnt about the spot removal tool, and the clone tool. I knew about these before but didn't really get how they worked and how I should use them. After many hours of practice I realise that it is all about subtlety. A little bit of one tool, and maybe a little of the other, take my time (patience again) and with a good eye miracles are possible. I managed to get rid of an almost impossible line, and doll blemishes you will never know where there.  It occurs to me that I am being an artist with my brush. Slowly, and with great finesse I can make my dolls more beautiful, and the trick is to show nothing. In other words the adjustment I make should blend in seemlessly, as if it was always there.

I can use these tools with a little more confidence and although the dolls shots aren't the best I have been able to make them pop a little more.

Removing Backgrounds - its all about edges

If you look closely at the photos in my previous post you will see that one of the dolls has a doll behind it. I was using it to prop up the doll so I could photograph at the right angle.

Yes I spent many an hour trying to get the doll removed from the background and the background to then match ones from other images. In the end I almost got it with the colour but I had to accept that I didn't have enough time to fix the edges against the dolls arm. So it was back to the drawing board and looking for another image that could work.

Colour catastrophe

So I thought the colour part would be a little bit more straight forward, but of course my Photoshop patience was called for again. Colour is made up of hues, saturation, and vibrance. But not only do we have this but we also have colour temperature, and just to top it off, colour is always in context of what it is with. A black can look at lot different if it is next to a dark green, versus a bright white.

Of course Photoshop again give me many ways to play with colour and I realise that although I can look at an image and know it isn't quite how I want it to look, I don't know what colour needs to go. Learning about colour is a world in itself. I know that I have a selection of doll images that have an earthy brown New Zealand look to them, but I want to set this against a steel fashion look to give a sense of elegance. There is a scene in the Miami Vice movie where it is very early morning and the colour of the sky is a cool steel blue, this is what I want.

But there is work to be done before I can get to this and the selection of images that I chose keeps changing as things don't go together. Here are 10 images from my first selection, along with the colour theme I started out with.

The patience of Photoshop

I have chosen my images, and then I do some serious cropping. I am starting to get an eye for what looks good but soon learn that a severe crop has its consequences. When I crop to A4, which is the crop size I am using for the edits, the image is filled in to fir the A4 size, voila noise. And some of the images had a serious problem with noise. I didn't expect this as I had made my images with a low ISO of 100.

The next thing I discover is that if I mistakenly set the A4 size with an extra 0 then the file size becomes so large that the PC dies. Trap for first time users. But I get it fixed and I start to understand how cloning and healing work. Again I get an eye and see how PATIENCE goes a long way when cleaning up an image.

I really get how getting the shot right in the first place is a far better proposition than spending hours tidying it up later in Photoshop. I learn about layers and masks, and get confused. But in all this there is the artist in me that said "i can do magic with this", and over time I will.

Here is the image that took me hours to just get the line you see in the background out. A before and after

That little bloody line, and the stress of a deadline did not leave me in a nice relaxed creative state.

The Big Edit

So now I have 105 images of dolls that I need to edit. I do a first cut and take out the duplicated shots and narrow it down to about 35. I take them with me on Tuesday and start to play around with cropping. Meighan helps me get a theme to a series and by the end of Monday I have around 15 images that I can make my series from. I have been toying with a new title, maybe Faked Fashion.

Studio stress

On Saturday I went and picked up a few more dolls and was ready for my studio time at 2pm. I had to get the camera on Friday so I had some time to look at it Friday.

I had a formula. shoot each doll with a white backdrop. Use only two lights, a snoot for focused highlights,and a box for the soft diffused. For each doll I would make sure I captured the parts that were most striking. Each doll had its own story to tell.

I arrived early at the studio to find it open and empty. I started to setup and found that the tether cable was missing, but the camera case had one so i was still good to go. I took almost an hour to get the lights right, the tripod right, capture one working and a process that would work for shooting around 10 dolls. More involved than I thought it would be.

But it wasn't long before I was in flow of things and I started to see that each doll had a history, and this reflected in their personality. Some were timid, others brash, and some with odd mannerisms. Yes if it seems that I got a little involved you would be right (I can see how people get into the fetish side of dolls).

But the important thing to remember is that each doll told a story of its owner, so really what I was doing is a portrait of the owners life as it is reflected in the doll. It was a fun exercise and I would love to do more, so having my own studio is definately on the cards. The ability to be able to control the light, and take your time with the shot is appealing and I would like to do more.

I finished on time at 5pm only to find the Mac dilema, you can't copy to PC formatted hard drives, so it took to Monday to get the images.

Here are three of my favourite images

Friday Presentation

So finally I have a coherent idea. Take a number of images, play with the concept of beauty, fashion faked, and do it all with a sense of doll elegance.

Here are the images I showed at my mini presentation

And to top it off I showed images from three photographers that I had discovered on m y research into Dolls. Here is an image from the photographer Laurie Simmons, website is http://www.lauriesimmons.net/

And one from Mariel Clayton. Her website is http://www.thephotographymarielclayton.com/

And last but definitely not least a fellow Australian Petrina Hicks
Her website is www.petrinahicks.com

I must admit the most inspiring for me is Petrina Hick, there is a sense of style and elegance that I want to be able to capture in the doll photos that I do.

No Fetishes Here

I must admit that it was tempting to go down the fetish track with doing doll photos, and there are some amazing photos out there. But this is a future possible project. For this project I want it to be about mystery, elegance, a sense of style, that captures how dolls reflect the lives we have.

Yet,

Doesn't this black and white convey a sense of style, albeit with a slightly wicked, kinky theme. But again dolls are a reflection of who we are....

Thursday - the light comes on

Here are the images I chose to show for Friday.

This is starting to make a body of work but again I came unstuck, these would not make a series of 10 images that tell a story.

On Thursday I sat looking at the images trying to come up with an idea, something I could hook into that would give me the impetus to carry on. Meighan suggested I storyboard the 10 shots and that they could be a grouped going top to bottom, rather than left to right. This was the visualisation that I needed, it all fell into place. I would take parts of dolls, and thsi would make up a doll. Imagine 10 images, two across and five down. The top two will be eyes, the next two noses, the next mouth, the next hands or clothes, and last clothes or feet.

I have a plan, I can see the final product....

Experimentation and Wednesday stress

This project has taken me a long time to get my head around. I started with wnting to do a series of portraits, and I looked at some famous photographers. But when I started to do a plan I realsied that I didnt really have enough time to be able to organise the sitters I would need.

The constraints of my life made me look at what I could photograph at home, and this lead me to looking at dolls. I had shot a doll before and there is something about dolls that attracts me. I then gathered up the dolls that Ruby had and started to ask friends for ones as well. I only managed to get 4 good dolls and I was struggling with what my story would be. If I can't see the big picture then I find it hard to work on the detail.

By Wednesday I was getting stressed, no storyline, no idea of how I actually wanted to photograph the dolls, so when I don't know what to do the best thing is to takle photos. I setup in the bedroom, shot with tungston and with a torch and had a look. God they were terrible, boring, nothing that would make soemthing go "that's cool". I started playing witht the images, cropping, contrast, colour temp, and finally got an image that was starting to look good. A bit more work and I had four photos taht I was happy they gave me a sort of direction.

Hans Bellmer - Dolls against Fascism

This German photographer lived through WWII and was so against Fascism that he started making dolls to counter the perfect beauty that was so sought by the Germany of the time. Some of the images are quite grotesque and eerie.

He had an eye for crating the unusual that's for sure. So I have to admit that with one day to go before I need to show some images and have a short speech done I am lost as to a theme to follow. Do I go for the Gothic, the unusual with props, or portraits that are partial parts of dolls. I think the later is what it most appealing, but do I have enough dolls to create the 10 i will need?

My selection of dolls

I now have a range of dolls to shoot and will have another one on Saturday. I have Molly and Manu, a Moari and Pakeha doll. I have two old fashioned dolls that were my mother's, and one sort of Barbi doll.

I hope that with light, colour, and angles I will be able to capture an aspect of them that will tell the story I see in them. I will try with some makeshift light setups at home, to get the type of shots I want. Then I will reshoot on Saturday when I have the studio booked.

I just hope that using the 5D, Capture One, and all the different lights doesn't get in the way of making good photos.

More Doll website research

Thanks to my ever supportive tutor I have another website to look at. So now I have three photographers and here is where I will show ten images from each. I have picked these three because they all have images with dolls or play with the concept of fashion and what is beautiful.

I will start with the first photographer I came across Mariel Clayton. The images I have selected show here subversive nature, but also her ability to set a scene and then photograph it. Every images has a story behind, a play on the roles that women play in society.

Her website is http://www.thephotographymarielclayton.com and I absolutely love the opening image, who is hanging themselves.

Of course the girl with the milk - is she a breather or non-breather


My next photographer is Laurie Simmons. I picked her because of the elegance of the shots, and a Japanese feel. Some of the images it is very difficult to tell that it is a doll, again a play on beauty, remember the saying "she's such a doll".

I love the girl, sorry doll, jumping over the wall, an everyday thing that a young girl, sorry doll, would do.

My last photographer is Petrina Hicks, an Australian photographer. Although she doesn't have the amount of the doll photos that the previous two do, she still plays on the idea of fashion, and fashion norms.

From the beauty of the barking dog, to a child that is so small and doll like. The image of the woman's face with long black hair is striking because of her beauty. I can appreciate her beauty, but it makes me wonder what is it that I see that tell me she is a breather. skin tone, the eyes..

Photographing dolls, and making them in some way beautiful, and yet with something a little different is my challenge. These photographers have raised the bar for me and I hope I can do them justice.