High Key Fashion

Our assignment: High Key fashion using a piece of fabric and a model.

____-Key refers to the range of tones in the image. A High-Key image is predominately gray-to-white in tones, while a Low-Key image is predominately black-to-gray in tones.

This was not an assignment I expected much success out of. I am not a fashionable guy, nor care to be, and I know very little about fabric. However, in the interest of making my semester abroad worthwhile I put forth a good effort.

I came across a model at Uni who had natural red hair and freckles. My roommate was nice enough to take me to a fabric store and we picked out a light blue sheer chiffon and a green satin that would compliment the model's hair color. I thought of many ideas before the shoot and when the model arrived we went through most of them in good time. I had a very good assistant, who I know from America. She did an excellent job in helping the model pose and arranging the clothing.

For the photographically inclined, here is my lighting diagram:


Well enough explanation, here are the results:

Skydiving near Brisbane

In 10th grade I used an English assignment "Take a major risk and write about it" as an excuse to go skydiving. At that time I went static-line, which is to say a rope attached to the plane automatically pulled my rip-cord.

This week I returned to the sky, jumping tandem from 14,000 ft. I was in free fall for about a minute, of which I remember only the sensation of my cheeks flapping. It is easily the most intense sensation I have ever felt. Not that such things can be quantified, but I'd say it was three times as crazy as going down the first hill of millennium Force at Cedar Point near my home in Ohio.

The plane was a rickety old thing. I am not exaggerating when I say the trip up felt less secure than the trip down! I guess nothing terrible could have happened after we were at 2,000 ft, if the plane started going down we would have just jumped. Nevertheless I was worried the whole way up!

My flat-mate Milosz ("Me-Losh") from Norway came along. I loved sky diving, but his reaction made mine look darn-right ordinary. He smiled like a girl who recieved a pony for Christmas.

Below are snapshots Milosz took of the day. They are not in chronological order, but the one with the cheeks pulled is taken afterwards and shows how I felt in freefall.

White on White Paper

My Studio Photography class had the following assigment: Using white paper and a white background, make the viewer feel or think about something other than paper.

My original idea was to produce gentle rolling hills at sunset, but paper will only bend into nice curves in one direction. So instead, I crumpled the paper up and then shaped it into jagged mountains. Using blue gelled lights I made the paper the color and shade of Nordic mountains, and with a red gelled light I created a sun in the orangish color of sunset. Finally a white light hit the mountains from behind to give them the nice "rim lit" look of a sunset.

In retrospect, the sky is black, when in fact it should realistically be red/orange and fairly bright. However, I think the surreal mood the black sky creates ends up being a positive. I'd love to hear comments for or against on this.

Shown below is the final image and a snapshot of the setup. For the uninitiated this type of camera shows the image upside-down and backwards when you look through it, so it's not unheard of to shoot your subject upside down when the situation allows. In this case though, the paper is mounted upside-down because I thought I might add fog using a water-heater, allowing its steam to rise and fill in the valleys. I ran out of time before I was able to try this idea.

This was shot on 4"x5" transparency film. This type of film costs US$2 a sheet and processing costs US$8. The resulting film can be scanned to 100-150 megapixels, which translates to a file size of around a gigabyte. A print can be made at 40"x48" and still have every part of the print show sharp detail at a viewing distance of 10". A print of this size or larger is not viewed at 10" but at several feet, so in the practical sense there is no limit to how large a print can be made from this type of film.

Use of my photos:
As a professional photographer my photographs are my life's work.
You are free to use any of the photos I blog in any non-commercial use, provided you do not change the image's content and you link to my website: www.DougPetersonPhotography.com
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