Friday 30 March 2018

A red kitchen

Hello, happy Easter holidays / bank holiday weekend!

Oops, this is the first time I've properly been behind; not just with the blogging but the actual shooting of challenges too. It's week 14 on Monday and I've only photographed content up to week 11.. hoping to shoot a lot of cool stuff over Easter though.

I've just finished editing a little behind the scenes video from my last selfie at The Hacienda London, which resulted in the image for week 10.

WEEK 10Vision: Selective ColorI know, I know. Yuck. Selective color can be cringeworthy, however, when done right, it brings compelling focus to the subject.
In the past I've been quite vocal about how much I despise selective colour but I've sort of calmed down on that now because if done right, I think it can look quite effective. I'm not by any means saying I 'do it right' because I'm not even sure what that means.
My take on it is if the colour palette in the image is already pretty neutral, specifically monotone, it seems to be easier to get a result which isn't cringeworthy, as the dominant colour pops out naturally in the colour version. I guess these are usually photos which are minimalistic in content, but they don't have to be. I also think it's not great to concentrate the selective colour to skin, ie. change skin to B&W but keep coloured make-up in the original shape of the lips / eyes. If the skin isn't a direct feature of the selective colour, I'm going to say it's fine to change it to B&W.
Part of me doesn't really know what I'm talking about whilst writing this as it all seems to contradict itself.. maybe it's just hard to write, lol. And there are no rights or wrongs really anyway, only what looks good and what looks bad.
You may think my attempt looks hideous, (even though I'm quite pleased with what I ended up with) which is fine(!)

Anyway I was staying at my second home, The Hacienda again and the kitchen is quite monotone.. mostly dark surfaces and stainless steel with bright flashes of red and not much of any other colour. I teemed this background, (I flipping love this kitchen) with a bright red dress I had in my suitcase and came up with a simple set-up of me sat on the worksurface in the dress with the red appliances around me on the same horizon. I knew I wasn't going to cut out the red items specifically to keep red, but make a 'bar' of colour right through the middle of the picture and have the top and bottom bits B&W only.. which is what I ended up with.
The lighting was stark because I kept the grid on the beauty dish - again it's what I wanted as it gave harsh light and starker shadows to match the hardness of the steel pots & pans. I didn't want a soft image.
As you can see in the video below, at first I placed the light side on, but moved it later to a 45 degree angle. My remote shutter release wasn't working that day so I ended up setting the camera on interval timer, (one photo every 5 seconds) and running backwards and forwards to the kitchen.
The camera was way back because I only had an 85mm lens, and I had to do a lot of moving about of the breakfast bar & stools.

Here is the making of the image, start to finish:



And here is the finished image as the image quality of the video is really poor. I'm not sure why as it looked much better whilst working on it in Photoshop. Maybe it's an export problem or maybe it's just my lowly iPad combined with low light not offering good enough quality.

The actual photograph was taken using a Nikon D850, settings: ISO 320, f5, 1/100th sec
Hope you enjoyed this!

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