Nancy Wall Shoot.

For this shoot, I went to ‘The Dome’ (as Nancy calls it) which is a very random area in Leigh, which has a large curved wall with ‘seats’ beneath it. Im not too sure what the proper name is but I thought that it would be a very good place to do my shoot inspired by Zavialov’s ‘solid colour’ image, where the background is just one solid colour. I took the photo of the model sat down because I thought that this would be compositionally interesting for the Zavialov’s concept. I took the images at a vertical orientation because I knew that, inevitably, I would crop the frame to a 1x1 square size and will be able to remove the trees that interrupted my shoot. 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.

With this image, I like the compositionally accurate placing of the model. This shoot was inspired by Zavialov’s ‘solid colour’ image, where the background is very plain and simple (and only one colour). However, I altered his style a little bit, by adding the stairs in the frame. When shooting, I asked myself whether I should have the model placed on top of the stairs, and just take one image of just her in front of the wall (like Zavialov’s) but I thought that this was better. The stairs create a curved line, in the image, which emphasises the focal point because the model interrupts the perfectly curved line. I also like the simplicity of this image, the white connotes freshness and purity which creates an atmosphere of cleanliness which is juxtaposed to ‘The Dome’ because, contextually whilst taking the image, there was actually lots of litter on the ground. Despite this, I managed to exclude it from my shoot. This could suggest that the way we perceive images on a screen, is different to real life or how good can always be found in the bad.

Developments:

Final Image.

For the developments of this image, I first cropped the frame to a 1x1 size (to replicate the Instagram style image). After this, I removed all of the marks and dirt off of the background, to try and maximise the “clean” look to the photograph. My main aim for the developments of the image was to make the solid background as clean and white as possible and also to try and make the background colours as similar to the Polaroid colours as possible. To achieve this, I selected the inner frame of the Polaroid photo and I increased the exposure and decreased the contrast, shadows and blacks and also subtly increased the whites. I also decreased the temperature slightly because the ‘cooler’ colour of the white gave it a titanium white look, which was brighter and cleaner than the original cream colour. After adjusting the lighting and colours on the inner frame of the Polaroid, i selected the background of the image and increased the whites to as much as i could, whilst still maintaining a natural look, I also increased the temperature because I noticed that the background looked more grey and dark than the lighting in the Polaroid photo, so i adjusted this and then increased the hue to maintain a clean white look.

On my developments for the “Nancy Cold Shoot” I saved the grain and texture settings as a preset. This meant that I could consistently keep the same Zavialov-style grain and texture, throughout all of my shoots. As a final step, I added the pre-set and slightly decreased the vignette because I didn't want the image to become too dark and refined the edges of the Polaroid so there wasn’t a clear lighting difference between the background and the Polaroid.