Way back in May the future looked a lot more bright for Melbourne as it does now. Coming out of a long stint of isolation, this was my first self-directed shoot in what felt like a lifetime. I spent a solid month prior photographing indoors, trying my hand with product photography. Despite this, I still felt a bit rusty with regards to shooting human subjects. Unnecessary nerves maybe? That said I picked a location that would be easy to work with, The Fitzroy Mills. It’s a popular with a lot of photoshoots so not the most original location but it offers two big ticks in my books: wide open spaces and minimal background distractions.
PHOTOSHOOT GOAL
A common photography mistake is forgetting how much of a negative impact background distractions can have on your subject. Yes, it’s an obvious factor when you actively think about it, avoiding intersecting lines, a busy background and the balance of symmetry and asymmetry. Being so focused on the subject it’s surprisingly easy to forget about these rules, for me at least. I mean fair enough right? I want to improve this mindset and for the most part I was happy with this approach. Increasing the depth of field, desaturating colour and forcing myself to look beyond the subject before hitting the shutter button.
After warming up on the ground floor with simple portraits, we moved to the rooftop area. I discovered Yuying is actually pretty damn talented with acrobatics / gymnastics and the shoot quickly shifted gears into an exercice in high shutter speed photography. While photographing, Yuying mentioned it’s easy to pull off moves like these. You can be the judge.
EDITING
I wanted to retain the warm colour of the sun while enhancing the shadows and highlights. Convey a mood that resonates with the late afternoon sun. I found black and white to be an ideal alternative for images with too much colour contrast of cool and warm or blotchy skin colour. B&W removes these issues while transforming the image, focusing on the striking highlight and shadow contrasts.
