Candle Shoot

For our last brief before we broke up for christmas we had to shoot a lit candle in the style of a product shot. We also had to do this on location. As I am not from Wakefield I don't really know much of the place and so I just did my shoot at my flat in my living room. I shot this at night and closed the curtains and only used my christmas lights on my sideboard for bokeh and a table lamp to the front right of the candles to create highlights to show the shape of the tealight holders. I also had to hold the camera to shoot this as my tripod wouldnt go low enough for the angle I wanted and my coffee table (which the candles are on) isn't very tall.

I don't think this really looks like a product shot but I felt that if you don't have a brand name on the candle then most pictures end up looking like just a good picture of candles. This was shot on my canon 450d with a canon 50mm f1.8 lens. The only editing I have done on this was put the clarity up a little and exposure up by just 0.05.

If I could do this again I would use some white card to bounce some of the table lamp's light back onto the left side of the holders as I think they are a little too dark and you loose the grain of them. It would also help to defuse the harsh highlight spot on the right sides.

Bianca Robinson & Jasmine Davis

My 1st year dancers were Bianca Robinson and Jasmine Davis. They were friends and so they both wanted the same thing and wanted to be shot at the same time. I thought this would be good at first and make them feel less awkward if they had a friend in the studio at the same time but it ended up being a distraction. Also with these dancers it was very hard to arrange meeting up with them as something tended to come up on either side. Eventually though I shot them in the studio. The white background was left up from the previous shoot.

After taking a few headshots and looking back at them some of the shots the background was turning out grey which looked better. The dancers preferred it to. However when I started shooting I found it hard to keep the background grey in every picture as I wasn't sure what was causing it. I then turned off the backlighting to dim the background. Eventually I also ended up turning off one of the softboxes. To get the grey background I ended up having a very dark exposure on all the studio pictures so when editing I had to lighten the exposure first. I am happy with the result though and I think they show off the dancers well and showed part of their own style and attitude also which was part of the brief.

I changed the outdoors pictures to black and white as I love black and white photography and it was an overcast day again. Although some of the pictures looked fine in colour they just gained a bit of punch with black and white which was done using a preset on lightroom.

Chelsey Goodman

At the start of November we were given the task to shoot the dancers from the college as they need images for their portfolio. At first we were told that we would have a dancer or two each but it turned out that both the 1st years and 2nd years needed pictures and so we ended up with 3-4 each. I was one of the lucky ones that only got 3 but it was still quite a challenge. Our brief was to produce a headshot, a half body shot and a full length shot for each dancer, both in studio and outside. They also had to show their personality at the same time.

Chelsey Goodman was my only 2nd year dancer. When I met her I got the impression that she wasn't interested and didn't want her picture taken. She offered little suggestion to what kind of style she wanted and how she wanted to portray herself. I therefore wasn't as enthusiastic as I should of been when it came to the shoot day. However to my surprise she came in very excited and was very easy to shoot. We each had an hours slot to shoot our 2nd year dancers on that day but I only needed half an hour which was helpful as it was a squeeze fitting everyone in for the day. The studio set up was two large softboxes at the front to light the dancer with flash. Two constant spots were on furthur back to light the background. I shot these on my Canon 450d with my 50mm f1.8 lens as it was relatively new to me at the time and I wanted to try it on portraits. I used the same camera and lens for the outdoors pictures. It was an overcast day and so the skys are all just blank white but I tried to change the sky to blue on one picture and with the tones of it it looked better white.


There was two headshots that I like. For the purpose of this brief I chose the first shot (top) as it shows her face better but I also liked the second one. The dance teacher also liked it alot and said that I did well as Chelsey can be quiet around new people so I was glad that she came out of her shell on the day of the shoot. This was my first experience taking pictures of a stranger and I really enjoyed it and I think that I have learnt quite a bit from it. I have made some errors in focusing etc but I have learned from that for next time.