Participating in the arts
My Strengths and Weaknesses as a photographer:
I worked out my strengths and weaknesses by talking to my classmates and looking at images I took in photography lessons.
Ideas for the project:
My Idea for an Arts Challenge:
Action Plan
To collect research I will:
- Get inspiration from horror books
- Get inspiration from horror movie posters
- research photographers that do horror
- Look up other book covers for the books I choose
To plan my project I will:
- Learn to use the studio lights
- Improve in Photoshop
- Learn how to use shutter speed and aperture
- Choose the books
To create my project I will:
- Find out where to get costumes
- Find settings and people to have photos of
- Feedback from teachers
- Edit pictures on Photoshop
To evaluate the success of my project I will:
- Ask opinions from students and do a questionnaire
- I could do a spot the difference between my covers and the real ones
- Write an evaluation based on the feedback and my own opinions of the project
- Post the pictures on the internet for photographers and authors to see
Learning to use the Photography Studio
My practice studio images
Learning to use Photoshop
Double exposure
Double exposure is really good for making creepy ghost pictures that would be good for horror. I wanted to use this effect in my book covers so I learnt to do it in two ways. With the camera (using a slow shutter speed and a flash to capture two images on the same plate) and with photoshop (using layers and layer blending to put pictures on top of each other.
Camera Double exposure
We set up in the dark. We set the camera to Bulb mode and held the shutter open. I asked Kristin to stand in one place and fired the flash at her. Then I asked her to move and fired the flash again.
Digital Double exposure
For this method, I took two or more pictures with the same background using a tripod. Then I edited them on top of each other using Photoshop layer blends.
My Final Project
I chose to make covers for :
- The Exorcist by William Blatty
- Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
- The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
- The Skipton Haunting by Andrew John Bell
- The Damnation Game by Clive James
You can see my research into these covers here.
You can see the final images here.