Group Task - 'From Capture to Print'

For this task we were asked to get in to groups of 3 people. We then had to use the skills and knowledge that we have gathered from our lectures and workshops and were asked to think about the light, exposure, and the process and treatment of the subjects that we photographed.

We were to start at 10am and finish by 4pm.

Our task was to produce a photograph influenced by one of the following film titles:

• Breakfast at Tiffany's
• The Fountain
• Into the wild
• Dead Man's Shoes
• Dog Day Afternoon
• A Clockwork Orange
• Sunset Boulevard
• Three Colours Red
• Rear Window

We first researched each film by, watching trailers, looking at posters and finding film covers.

After doing this and talking about what ideas we had, we finally decided to do 'Dead Man's Shoes' and found the film still below and chose to try and recreate this.

To recreate this shot we first tried to find a toy axe but after a long time of searching with no success we settled with a meat cleaver.
Luckily, one of the people in my group was already wearing a jacket very similar to the one in the shot, so he was chosen to be the model.
The thing we struggled with was the sky and the sun shining through his arm.
In the film still the sky is light blue with thin, wispy clouds but when we were shooting our photo the sky was very grey and overcast so we later brightened it up in Adobe Photoshop. The problem we had with sun was that it was too high in the sky to be able to position our model for it to be shining under his arm so we also had to add this as a lens flare in Photoshop.
To try to get the angle of the model the same I knelt down and shot the photo from a low angle.
I underexposed the photo to create the almost silhouetted figure against the sky.

This was our final image:


f5.6 - 1/50 sec - ISO 400 - WB-Daylight

The photo was taken on a Canon 400D with a 18-55mm lens set to 35mm and was taken on RAW file format.