Hello Darkness My Old Friend…

This last week I shot a series of creative portraits, which are available in the Portfolio section, which featured long exposure with consistent lighting on highly reflective material. This required a completely black studio as any white material would bounce and create some unwanted artefacts in the images.

Unfortunately I tried to book a dedicated black studio but they never got back to me so with a looming deadline I did what I thought was best… improvise.

Boot for scale.

Buying 15 metres of black poplin material from spotlight and sewing a rather large panel, I planned on pinning it to the black curtain at the small TAFE studio and hoping that would minimise the whiteness. This would have worked brilliantly except I left the pins at home, so more improvising occurred with the black flat panels, which unfortunately also had reflective tape on it which bounced the light into the camera. Perseverance being a keyword here I trucked along as I needed to have something ready for this assessment.

After an hour of different changes in reflective clothing, and the occasional slipping of the fabric moving under my feet. I came away with several different images and variants of images that I hope would work when it comes to editing.

Screaming into the void.

At the end of the shoot I started to experiment with a long exposure headshot with a still pose and movement in different positions and facial expressions. Even as I was shooting I knew it wasn’t as cohesive to the rest of the images in the series but i felt the expression and the movement had something about it and I want to explore this concept further in the future.

S