Body: Shoot and Final Image

The effect i was going for with my image was to have a pure white background, and an evenly lit model in the foreground. To do this, i used the following lighting setup.

The boards on either side of the backdrop reflected the light back onto the back drop. Both lights were on the same power to make the lighting even. With thee 2, the background measured at f22. To light my model, i used a large softbox that was positioned right above the camera and right in front of the subject. I turned this flash down to measure f8, giving a large enough gap between the background and subject exposures. This means that when i exposed for my subject, the background would be over exposed and would come out pure white.

My first roll of film showed that i had over exposed the images slightly to begin with. Also, the model was too close to the backdrop, so the background flashes were spilling onto him. I moved him forward and shot another roll.

These images were better exposed, and i was happier with the poses of my model. I marked with red pen the images i wanted to use.

Printing the final images, i wanted them to be very contrasty. The white shirt that my model was wearing was nearly blending into the background, so i wanted to darken everything else in the image. I started off by making a test strip to find my ideal exposure time.

From this i worked out that the best exposure time was around 15 seconds at grade 2. To bring in some contrast, i started to add some grade 5. My second test strip was made with 10 seconds at grade 2, and 5 seconds at grade 5. This gave just the right amount of contrast i was after.These were my final images.

There was still some leaked light at the bottom of te image that i could have cropped out, but i decided to leave it as the images looked wierd being just from the waist up. Picking the 2 images where my model kept the same facial expression really helped to show this idea of how we see people differently when we know they have tattoos.