16 November 2010

Come Clean

Given a brief to photograph a Burton based business capturing the architectural and design qualities of the business along with photographing the owner, a worker or a customer.

Read through the list of ideas on the brief and was instantly attracted to the idea of photographing a funeral parlour. Found that most local funeral parlours are owned by Co-op Funeral Services so decided to look for a smaller locally owned business. Was attracted to the idea of a launderette.


Come Clean
Come Clean is  the other side of the River Trent - picked up a lighting kit; packed up my Canon 5D and set off. This involved a long walk to the River as I could not fit a lighting kit and an assistant into my car.

Arriving at Come Clean Launderette had a look to see how busy the shop was. There were 3 people in so we stepped in and began chatting. After chatting to the owner and the two ladies working for him we were given permission to set up as long as we did not photograph him. He said he was wanted by the police - which made everyone laugh. 

I instantly fell in love with the dark green chairs against the orange painted panelling.

Chairs

We set up the lighting kit and the camera. After the direction from Julian last month I am much happier and confident handling the lighting kit.

The launderette was a very small space and was actually quite well lit - but the lighting was really lifting the images (as far as I could tell on the small screen on the back of the camera). Used the snoot and experimented with the umbrella as some of the images were looking a little over-exposed and  bright. Also experimented with adjusting the levels on the light and also tried  with facing it away from the object and bouncing it off walls/ceiling. 

Drum

Orange



Powders

I am very happy with the images I captured. I tried to capture images that were not my 'usual' style. I did manage this because Julian could not decide which were the ones I had taken and which were Steph's.

I was anxious approaching the people in the shop and actually backed away from doing it. I know this is because of what has been happening recently - my confidence is low at the moment. Glad I did this in pairs as we were able to work off each other's strengths.

I will use the images I captured to create a magazine layout. I will take the orange in the images and use that for the colour of the heading and prepare some text to support the images. Rosalind was very chatty and I will record some of our conversation. I will update my blog with the magazine spread - might be the weekend before I do that.

Update:
Here is my magazine layout. I did a dps for a magazine called Dwell - they like to keep it real so I thought an article about laundrettes would fit in with their editorial style. I enjoyed doing this.




- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -