Nancy Cold Shoot.
For this shoot, I went to the Marine Parade in Leigh-on-sea because it has a very significant and level skyline so it was an ideal background for using Zavialov’s concept because I could line up the Polaroid image easier due to the the defined line between the grass and the sky. This was also a very useful background for my shoot because I could use the rule of thirds to line up the composition of the image. I named my shoot ‘Nancy Cold’ because unexpectedly the weather was extremely cold (as you can see from the redness of my fingers) and my model is called Nancy. Despite the unintentional cold weather, It actually gave the image a ‘cool’ effect, and created interesting cloud arrangements which contrasted the solid green grass. I used a ‘Fujifilm Instax SQUARE SQ1’ for the Polaroid-style image. I used an iPhone XR to take the final image, with the ‘grid’ setting turned on.
Original Image.
For this image, the harmonious colours of the blue sky and the green grass are pleasing to the viewer’s eye and help the image look natural – which was my overall aim for this shoot. With this concept, the aim is to make the photographs look as natural as possible, because you want the background to match up with the Polaroid image to create the “Instant Moment(s)”, so this is why I find it very beneficial to have harmonious colours in the image. In addition to the harmonious colours, I used the rule of thirds for this photograph to add to the natural look. To help with this, I turned on the grid setting for my iPhone so a grid would appear on the screen of my iPhone whilst taking the image. I horizontally lines the bottom third with the grass, the centre third with the Polaroid photo and the top third with the sky. This created a natural look and drew the attention to the focal point (Polaroid) because the Polaroid is in between the top and bottom spaces.
This shoot and photograph links to my “The World Around Us” theme because I took it in the natural world outside and natural colours of the cold weather, portraying the true beauty of nature, and the beautiful impact it can have in photography – much like Zavialov does in many of his images within his concept.
Developments.
Editing Time-lapse:
Grass Adjustments.
Sky Adjustments.
Overall Adjustments.
Inner Polaroid Frame Adjustments.
adjusting the size of the subject:
Opened half-developed image into photoshop, and used “magnetic lasso” to precisely select the subject (model).
Refined the edges of my selected subject and clicked the “[tick]” button.
Copied and pasted the selection as a new layer. Selected the “background” and started to erase the original subject with the “healing” tool.
Finished erasing the previous subject to create an empty background, ready for the scaled version.
“Edit > Transform > Scale . Scaled the subject until it was as large as I could, without it looking unnatural. Finished.
Final Image.
For all of my Maxim Zavialov images I spend the majority of my project on the developments stage. I do this because, with this particular concept, I have no control over my camera settings on either my iPhone or the Polaroid photo. As a result, I have to artificially alter the lighting using a digital editing software such as Adobe Lightroom and/or Adobe Photoshop. The first thing I did when editing was cropping the image to a 1x1 square, to replicate the Instagram-style square image that Zavialov uses. I selected the Polaroid photo and increased the exposure and contrast and I decreased the highlights to try and match the lighting in the iPhone image. After making the adjustments to the inner Polaroid, I noticed that the colours of the Polaroid image were very different to the iPhone image. As a result, I selected the grass and artificially added a green colour and decreased the contrast and the tint (towards the green side) to match the colour of the grass in the iPhone image. I did a similar adjustment to the sky of the Polaroid image too, however I coloured it blue and subtly decreased the temperature to match the natural blue colour of the sky, taken by the iPhone. For my final adjustments, in Adobe Lightroom I only made minor adjustments to the lighting because I wanted to keep the image as natural as possible, however I did increase the texture, clarity and added grain to my image to create a 'vintage' style image which Zavialov uses in his images. As a finishing touch to the overall adjustments I added a dark vignette to emphasise the focus on the Polaroid image in the centre. Finally, I opened Photoshop and enlarged the subject (model) because in many of Zavialov's images the model is large enough to fit the whole frame, so I did this as well, whilst trying to maintain a natural look.