As part of a brief at Uni we have been given the task of creating a double page spread for a magazine of our choice. I have chosen Lula magazine because I love it, it’s so different from any other magazine I have seen. I love the fashion and the child-like motifs that run through out it, titles such as “Welcome to the Doll’s House” and “Once Upon a Time” are used through it to give it a fairytale style feel. The photographs are simple yet effective, they have different styles of photography within the magazines, but my favourite style and the one which i feel gives the magazine it's distinct identity are the ones that are dream-like and playful. A lot of these images use faded or pastel colours and the soft focus gives it a hazy dream like appearance. We are lucky enough to have copies of all the issues of Lula in the library at Uni and so I have spent a lot of time going through back issues and scanning or photocopying images from the magazine for inspiration.
We have been given a very short time in which to complete this brief, only three weeks, one of these we were to be away in New York for and so this left us with only two working weeks at Uni to complete it. The idea of this being that we get used to creating good quality images with a very quick turnover time. I got onto it straight away, getting inspirational pictures from the magazines and sketching ideas, my main idea was the theme of a teddy bears tear party. However as I developed this I moved on from the teddy bear idea and just made it a picnic/tea party in the woods. I scouted for locations in the New Forest, taking pictures of different areas that could be potential for the shoot and seeing how the light fell at different times of the day so I could figure out when would be the best time to shoot. I made some initial sketches in my sketchbook, I then found a model and an assistant and went out to shoot.
I used a Metz flash (borrowed from the stores at Uni) to shoot but unfortunately it stopped working half way through the shoot, batteries were fully charged and I was told later that it's just because the flashes "are just old." However as I had chosen quite a sunny day to shoot, it meant that the loss of the flash was not a big problem, the shadows weren't too harsh and the sun light being bounced back with a silver reflector was sufficient and actually looked really nice, gentle and natural.
I wanted to achieve that faded, hazy, soft focus look in my images but as a student I cannot afford a proper soft focus lens. I looked on the Internet for cheaper alternatives to this and read that one way you can do this is stretching nude coloured tights across the lens. I was sceptical about whether this would work but I decided to give it a try, I took some test shots at home using this technique and found that it worked wonderfully. So I decided to implement this into my shoot and got the results that I was after.
Here are some of the images from my shoot. If I had more time I would like to develop this into a much bigger picnic with two or three more people and lots more props.
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