Mirror Bride

I thought about giving this project a miss today what with it being the Christmas holidays and all that, but I needed to burn a few extra calories so I packed a bag of fancy dress and props to accompany myself and Tigerbelle Model on a hike down to the beach.


Mirror Bride

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani
Model: Tigerbelle

Sometimes we scare ourselves

I took a few sequences when I worked with Rachelle Summers recently and hopefully over the Christmas period I'll catch up with myself.

Everything I'm doing at the moment seems to be about learning and I've noticed that although everything was constant between the two sets of images there are differences in the tones of Rachelle sitting, so I present this GIF as a work in progress. Hopefully I can work out what went wrong and I'll have learnt something new to take into future goes.




Rachelle Scares Herself

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani
Model: Rachelle Summers

The Argument

I had a wonderful shoot with the model Rachelle Summers last week and had the foresight to take a series of pics that I could work on over the Mondays running up to the Christmas break.

I'm thoroughly enjoying making pictures with very simple camera trickery techniques. In keeping with this interest we worked on a series of double exposures that would work both as individual still shots and sequential GIFs.

It can get a little complicated at times, splitting the film into two, counting each step on the first so that it matches the second. Your mind can get lost in trying to work out the logistics on some of the more complicated attempts, but I think we managed to get there in the end and I'm looking forward to bringing the remaining work together over the next weeks and seeing the final pieces.



The Argument

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani

Model: Rachelle Summers

Metropolis

Ever in the search of something new to try I thought I'd attach my Macro lens and a 1.5 converter to the Monochrom today and try a bit more shooting blind.

A few problems presented themselves fairly early on in the process. Shooting blind is hard. Shooting blind incredibly close up is even harder.

I did however learn that a bag of liquorice all sorts makes a good bean bag support for the Monochrom.


Although the results weren't perfect 'as is', many of the pictures had graphic white reflections from the table lamp I'd been using and these intrigued me. Pushing blacks, whites, and playing with contrast I imported them into Photoshop and layered them onto a black background.

A bit of flipping, turning and manipulating later and abstract themes of chaotic cities started to emerge. Patterns of lights made me imagine sky rises, smog, rain and speeding cars. And thus, the Metropolis cityscapes began to take shape and although I was feeling a bit 'Meh' to begin with, once the pictures had spoken to me and I had found my inspiration and direction I ended up rather liking the experimental results.


Metropolis - Futurescapes

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani