Evaluation
Welcome to the end of my final major project. In this evaluation, I will be dissecting the project as a whole and also looking at each individual decade in detail. Commenting on what happened, my feelings, analysis of the situation. Conclusion of situation including an action plan if it arose again.
The 20s shot was just a simple product shot of the bottle. Looking at the reference photo, the background had a black to white gradient so we had to somehow recreate this. After a while of trying different ways, I found that the best way was to place a light between the background and foreground to create the blend so it went from white - grey - black. Having a slight bend in the background sheet created a shadow that worked perfectly for the photo. I wanted the photo to have the effect that it didn’t look like it was sitting on a surface and I wanted to get it a close to the original illustration as possible. I ended up putting a little plastic base under the bottle to separate it from the ground. Lighting wise I used a little top light to shine down on top of the bottle to create a harsher contrast from the background. For these collections of photos, I decided to take some 35mm on the side. For this photo, I feel like I might have not accounted for ISO. This is because I took the settings from my DSLR straight over to my 35mm but I forgot that the ISO on the DSLR was 100 and on the 35mm was 400, which means that the picture may well be overexposed. I won’t know until I get the photos back and unfortunately as of the deadline date, the film developers still haven’t got back to me even though I sent it off more than 2 weeks ago.
Post-production wise shooting in RAW is very powerful. You have pretty much complete control over the photo as a whole and can transform and improve the photo a significant amount. This doesn’t mean that you should rely on photoshop you should always make sure that the production photo is shot right and correctly exposed. It’s harder to bring out the detail when the original photo is underexposed because there is no data there to create. Using several diffusion filters, surface blurs, sharpening and high passes I was able to make the bottle seem less photo-realistic and more illustrative. I even took out some detail particularly at the bottom of the bottle. After seeing the photo in physical, high-quality print I noticed that there were some flaws that I didn’t quite catch on my computer. At the top of the bottle just under the neck, it’s clearly visible where I cut out the bottle from the background. When I edited this photo I hadn’t learnt about correctly compositing photos and using masks to feather edges and use smart curves. If I was to create this photo again in the future I would use the correct way that would be a much cleaner way to cut the photo out. Also, I could have cleaned up the label a bit more as it was quite grainy, this was from the multiple sharpening and high pass filters. In conclusion, this iconic 20s shot was a strong start to the collection.
The 30s was a hand-drawn newspaper extract advert. This is the first picture in the collection where I used my cousin Chloe as a model. Getting her to sit in the right position to match the original photo was a struggle but we finally got there. It didn’t matter too much what the background looked like because it was getting hand-drawn anyway. We set up the backdrop outside as we had to follow social distancing rules, this meant that we could use natural sunlight as the lighting. Fresh air is always a plus and it meant we could keep our distance. Some of the cons of working outside: you can’t control the sunlight if you wanted to create shadow you’d have to move your subject in relation to the sun to create a shadow. It was quite windy on the day so the backdrop kept falling over. We also got bird poo on the white backdrop which was pretty annoying. When it got round to tracing and drawing Chloe, I printed out the photo and stuck it to the LED panel to trace around. I then digitized this into photoshop and whited out some of the flaws. I wasn’t able to use photoshop to create Chloe into a line drawing because the photo was too complex and there was too much detail to be able to use whereas the Chanel bottle is easy and basic shapes and lines so I was able to turn the bottle easily into a line drawing easily using photoshop.
I’m not entirely happy with the picture as I think the line drawing of Chloe looks a bit odd, I did it once and did it again but I was just hopeless at creating a line drawing, this is obviously why I took film and not art. I put a yellowish colouring over the whole picture to match the original but I think the photo looks still a bit too saturated. In the future, I would like to spend more time perfecting my line drawing skills.
The 40s shot was another product shot. This time showing off a range of different products. In the original photo/illustration there is a hand holding the products, but unfortunately, there aren’t any nice-looking/feminine hands in the house. I devised a way to hang the products down from a gantry using ribbon. For the bottle ribbon, the bottle was way too heavy and risky to hang just from the ribbon, so I reinforced it with twine which I then later could photoshop out. We tried out different backdrop colours such as white and greys and different distances from the products to try and get the right shadow that I wanted. We found that grey suited the photo to better match the original. Using a front on LED panel we shone the light straight onto the products to give the shadow behind. Because some of the products were angled I used a reflector for the first time to fill in some of the shadows left on the products. This particular reflector is an old cake base plate that worked perfectly. I've always underestimated reflectors and will be definitely using them in the future. Because the scene wasn’t lit enough I had to use a slower shutter speed and because the products were slightly spinning there was a bit of motion blur in the photo, which I could easily fix in post but it definitely made my life a bit harder.
. Looking at the photo now I feel I should have used a different focal length. In portraiture, it matters which focal length you use because of the distortion on the face. The most natural focal length for portraits is 50mm. Using this focal length for this product shot would have been nice because it feels natural and less stretched, I couldn’t use this focal length because there wasn’t enough room for me to move back to get everything in the shot. In post I took away the shadows of the ribbon as I thought the picture looked too busy. This also gave the picture a less than realistic feel which I wanted. Using directional shadows I was able to enhance the shadows more. The Chanel logo also had a directional shadow and I applied some grain to it to match with the picture as a whole.
The 50s. One of my more iconic photos in the collection. The 50s was the decade that introduced the muses(faces) of Chanel, I wanted to create a sort of ad that introduced this for the 50s. Getting the angle and position of Chloe was the most important thing to do. Working with Chloe was great, shes had experience with modelling in the past and didn’t mind being bossed around too much. She changed her outfit and make up for every single shoot to match the source which was great. I need to improve on my directing skills such as stage directions for getting the right poses that I want. The edit is what made all the difference. I wanted the picture to be black and white but have the bottle in colour which I thought I pulled off very well. The background was quite plain so I added in fake Bokeh in the background to add more detail and depth to the picture. I even added in the spray to the photo to make it a little more interesting. Again using a reflector to the scene lightens up shadows for more detail. This photo perfectly matched the 50s original and I think this was one of the most successful photo in the collection.
The 60s shot that I currently had wasn’t my original idea. The photo I had wanted was a picture of Chloe standing up with her hair blowing in the wind which then would be composited into a bottle. Unfortunately, I hadn’t got the correct pose for this photo so I had to change my whole plan. After doing some more research into 60s adverts I found a picture that I could recreate while using the photos I had already taken for my original idea. Taking the photo of Chloe for this shot was fun because I got my whole family involved, I got my aunt and uncle to hold hairdryers and fans up to Chloe and got my other cousin to hold the reflector. Its all well and good being a one-man band but when you’ve got a team you can direct it makes it so much easier and fun, especially with my family. The photo is equally divided up to pixel level. I had to some maths to work out how big each section of the photo could be, I worked out that section had to be 620x745 pixels to fit correctly into the photo, I found that even if you were 1 pixel out that it would stick out like a sore thumb so I spent a lot of time perfecting it. I liked the layout of this photo using a wide range of products and sticking to a black-white grey contrast colour scheme.
The 70s, another iconic picture to the collection where Chloe is acting as Catherine Deneuve. To put my own twist on this photo as I have tried with the rest of them, I incorporated a mirror into the photo to create reflection and add more detail. To light up the scene, we used the direct sunlight outside. This meant that the sun was being reflected into Chloe’s eyes that actually dried out her contact lenses and hurt her eyes, so in between every photo she closed her eyes and when I was about to take the photo I counted down from 3. If you look closely between the post edited photo and the final photo you’ll see that Chloes left eye looks slightly different. In the post edited photo, her left eye looked a bit wonky and was annoying me so I copied her right eye and composed it into her left eye. Doing this made me think how powerful software can be and made me contemplate the actual reality of photos we see in the media today and how fake they could actually be. A bit deep there sorry, let’s move on. The shadows on Chloe’s face were a bit too contrasty so I learnt how the spot healing brush and cloning brush to smooth over the rough surfaces and shadows. Also, I hadn’t completely got the whole mirror in the shot so I was able to use content-aware to recreate the mirror shot and get rid of some scratches and hairs in the shot. If I were to do this again I would shoot the photo indoors with some lights that didn’t hurt the talent as much.
I struggled a lot with the 80s, there weren’t many adverts from the 80s that were any different from the other decades but I managed to find a photo that accurately depicted the 80s - Gold, bling and pearls. The original photo is actually a quarter of a bigger photo/ art piece that was made. At the time of creating the photo, I hadn’t planned to see my cousin to do a photo shoot. Instead, I used a mannequin dummy that fashion designers pin their garments to for sizing and fitting. I thought this fit quite well anyways because Chanel is also known for its fashion and clothes, It might have been what Gabrielle Chanel used when creating her garms. I covered in the dummy in fleece to create texture and contrast between the pearls. I focussed a lot on getting the lighting right for the background photo. I used a key light to light up the left shoulder and made sure a shadow ran down the front of the chest. Then using a smaller light I lit up the right side of the body to create a fill light to ever so slightly fill in the right side of the pearls to keep their roundness and shininess. I learnt a lot about lighting during this project that I can definitely use in the future. I also struggled with getting the right angle for the bottle to sit on the border. In the first instance, I had used the stretch tool in photoshop and distorted it too much, it wasn’t until I asked my uncle about it where he showed me the angle to take the photo. I duplicated the bottle, blurred it and turned it upside down to create a mirror effect which worked quite well.
90s was the year of Andy Warhol, although Andy made the photos at the start of the 80s and died to the end of the 80s. Chanel released these never before seen photos in the mid-90s. My original idea was to recreate these photos in-camera, sort of using the set up I used for my 20s shot but instead of using black and white backdrop, I would use different colour backdrops to make the gradient. But after watching a tutorial on luminosity mask I decided to create the photos digitally. Youtube tutorials have been my saviour since the start of the projects, I have learnt so much over these last couple weeks from youtube videos alone, I can then take this and put my own twist on it. Using luminosity masks it turns the picture solid black and white, you then use brightness and contrast to balance the white and black in the photo, using a gradient map you can map a gradient to either black or white. I then created one set of photos which I then played around with blending modes and inverted colours to create different colourways and photos. My final photo was a blend of two photos one inverted one not.
The 2000s photo was the last photo in the collection of Chloe, A simple portrait picture of Chloe to represent the simplicity and elegance of the Chanel Brand. Chloe did a great job on getting the outfit and makeup for this one, matching the original perfectly.Again using the sunlight to light the scene as we couldn't go inside. In post I used an exposure brush to make the background black to match the original.I even changed the shadows on the shoulder. Didn't really have too many problems with this photo. If I had more time I would have found a way to create the necklace into a number 5.
Here we find ourselves in the 2010s. I saw that the 2010 shots were very similar to the 2000s, but a lot of the photos did have big light up 5s in the photo. So I had the bright idea(haha) to use sparklers to create the 5. We ordered number 5 sparklers, ones you would put on a birthday cake. I placed it behind the bottle outside and lit the sparkler. I then took a long exposure shot that lasted the whole duration of the sparkler. It lasted 52 seconds so I was happy I adjusted for just the right amount of exposure.No other lights were needed in the scene, the sparkler lit the whole scene. I missed out the top end of the sparkler from setting it alight to pressing the shutter but I was able to easily clone it back into photoshop. I also masked out a few other flaws and the photo was done. The way the sparks flew out on the picture just look great and amazing so I am very happy.
Here we end at my last final major picture, the 2020s. As there isn't a well established Chanel campaign for this decade yet, I decided to have a crack at creating my own original picture. I wanted to do something that would represent the start of the decade as a whole, a picture that could be a metaphor for how tragically the 20s has started out. Civil unrest, a pandemic, injustice and recession. But even in all that elegance and beauty can still shine through, as represented in this photo. I travelled down to one of my favourite places, Dungeness, Britian's only dessert consisting of miles and miles of shingle with decaying boats and buildings scattered around. I thought that Dungeness would be the perfect place for this photoshoot.