This shoot was inspired by the photographer, Jingna Zhang, who is an extremely diverse photographer in my opinion, her work ranges from fashion to beauty to even film and her style of work changes depending on her project. For this shoot, I wanted to focus on the fashion side of her photography and in particular, her magazine shoots. Her models are usually dresses in elegant wear, mainly dresses, and I wanted to replicate that, but in my own style. I asked my model to wear a turtle neck (one of Zhang's models wore a turtle neck) with a skirt which made the outfit quite casual, but still elegant, additionally, she wore a pea coat styled outwear in some of the shots to change it up a bit. In Jingna Zhang's work, her model usually holds a flower or is surrounded by flowers, flowers symbolise elegance, femininity and delicacy which is evident in her work, with the outfits, background and poses it looks extremely feminine and the use of a flower prop adds to this idea.
The shoot was done in The John Roan School's studio where I was able to use professional equipment I also experimented with both a black and white background to see so that I can have a variety of shots addition to that, I also experimented with the different lighting equipment which explains some of the pictures having a yellow tint. I bought both fake and real flowers for the model to hold since this seemed like a signature look for Zhang's work. Furthermore, it is clear that she uses a fan to create movement in her images with the hair, I tried to incorporate this into my work, but it was quite difficult since I was not able to bring a fan into the school, therefore I had to resort to use a piece of cardboard, which led to me fanning with one hand and trying to capture the images in another.
I feel like the shoot was quite successful as I was able to get good shots to display. In order to improve, I would've asked my model to bring a couple of outfits so that I have a selection of clothes that I can use, in a magazine, the model usually has different clothes for each of the images. Also, due to the fact that I had to manually create wind with cardboard, I missed quite a lot of potentially good shots that was blurred, if I were to get a physical fan, the images would be more effective.
The shoot was done in The John Roan School's studio where I was able to use professional equipment I also experimented with both a black and white background to see so that I can have a variety of shots addition to that, I also experimented with the different lighting equipment which explains some of the pictures having a yellow tint. I bought both fake and real flowers for the model to hold since this seemed like a signature look for Zhang's work. Furthermore, it is clear that she uses a fan to create movement in her images with the hair, I tried to incorporate this into my work, but it was quite difficult since I was not able to bring a fan into the school, therefore I had to resort to use a piece of cardboard, which led to me fanning with one hand and trying to capture the images in another.
I feel like the shoot was quite successful as I was able to get good shots to display. In order to improve, I would've asked my model to bring a couple of outfits so that I have a selection of clothes that I can use, in a magazine, the model usually has different clothes for each of the images. Also, due to the fact that I had to manually create wind with cardboard, I missed quite a lot of potentially good shots that was blurred, if I were to get a physical fan, the images would be more effective.
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I wanted to break the stereotype of females having to be elegant and seen as fragile, to do this, I changed the lighting to a dimmer light and the background to black in some of my images such as the images on the left, her pose emits power and dominance which is a huge contrast to to the former images. |
Contact sheet:
Manipulations:
For the manipulations below, I was inspired by Jingna Zhang's magazine covers. Originally, I wanted to create a whole magazine, but I felt that it would take a long time to create due to the fact that magazines usually have a lot of articles and if I were to create a magazine I would also need to come up with and write articles myself which would extremely time consuming. Therefore, I settled with creating the magazine cover and a spread that would be seen in a magazine with the watermark of the company.
The first image above is the front page of the magazine, I chose this particular image because it emits masculinity and femininity which is the main objective that I wanted to achieve when doing this shoot, so I thought it would be perfect as the front cover. For the background, I used Photoshop to edit it to resemble Zhang's backgrounds, quite smooth with a slight gradient. I was able to achieve this through using the quick selection tool to select the background and adding clouds with a very low opacity which helps to even out the background. Usually, magazine front covers has an article title to give a sneak peek into what the magazine is about so I thought that I should add that into my work and I used the title of one of my other shoots so it seems like my exploration of my personal investigation are the articles of the magazine.
For the last two images I just added the magazine name on the top right corner to act as a watermark, like real magazine spreads.
For the last two images I just added the magazine name on the top right corner to act as a watermark, like real magazine spreads.