Model Photography

Sometimes there are occasions in photography when your  projects make your family really worry about you.

Such was the occasion recently when I had an idea for the latest club competition. Recently competitions have become  a bit of a grind due to a  combination of poor weather, lack of opportunity and just just mental tiredness.  However I had been looking forward to this particular club competition. The competition was "Album or book covers" and the brief was for a photo that could be used for existing book or albums.

Obviously the first reaction is to go through in your cycle through all your album and book back catalogue and think of existing photos that might fit. However I also wanted to take the opportunity to do something new. The question was what?  Again the initial thought is to do one of the books or albums you love.  However in the end my choice may seem a bit surprising.

I chose......

Barbie Girl by Aqua

Now firstly let me state I loath this record with all my heart.

Firstly is the tune which sticks in your head like a 6 inch nail (It is in your head now isn't it? I am so sorry)

My second issue are the lyrics

"I'm a blond bimbo girl in a fantasy world

Dress me up, make it tight, I'm your dolly

You're my doll, rock'n'roll, feel the glamour in pink

Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky

You can touch

You can play

If you say "I'm always yours"

Not so "Me Too" generation more a Harvey Weinstein wet dream.

Then there is the whole concept of Barbie itself. Bringing up two daughters I have been bombarded with Barbie memes and items while they grew up. The whole concept is for Barbie to that a girl should have no greater ambition than to just use her phone or hang out on the beach. My youngest daughter really loved the Barbie movies, and although it showed Barbie with a bit more spunk (Not literally, we know Barbie would never do that), it was all prefaced by the need for Barbie to marry a prince.

So not exactly an obvious choice. The reason I chose it however was that I thought taht it would be great to turn the Barbie metaphor around. Not a submissive play thing, but a strong character in control of her own life.
 r on the plus side I had courtesy of my daughters access to a lot of raw material and I  had already been playing with them for another project.(Any Mattel executives reading this may want to look away now)

 

 Lets go Barbie

Raiding my daughters cupboards I already had some of raw materials. However I needed a male doll, so it was onto eBay to get a cheap "Ken". I also needed to Barbie attire which was let us say less wholesome than  is usually provided. So it was again to the internet, although I would not recmmend googling  "Barbie sexy lingerie" to anyone with a sensitive disposition.
 
When I received my "Ken" I realised I had a problem. I had in mind a specific pose for Ken, but I was found that unlike Barbie,  Ken comes with no knees or elbows. Basically he appears to be designed to stand around while letting Barbie get on with the household chores, look after the dog and the baby etc. One solution would be to use photoshop to bend Ken's limbs as required, but that would of made getting my montage correct. Therefore more drastic action was required via the use of a hacksaw and superglue.  

We can rebuild him, we have the technology

The rest of the setup was relatively simple. A false wall was built out of card and decorated with suitable wallpaper and placed on a old floor tile.  The figures were positioned in various poses and photos taken with a single flash on a diffuser.  The biggest problem was the looks I got from both my Wife and Daughter when they stumbled over what I was doing. . However they have long ago accepted my foibles although I did feel a little guilty besmirching my daughters childhood despite good my intentions

Barbie does glamour model.

Life in plastic, it's fantastic

This was the result. My concept was not the usual Stepford wives Barbie, but an anti-barbie who was in control and was not going to be submissive to anyone and I was quite pleased how it turned out.

50 shades of pink

I must admit however I had some of misgivings about entering it since I don't know what the reaction would be from the judge or the other club members.

Fortunately in a judge we had Ashley Franklin. Apart from being one of the nicest and best Judges on the circuit, Ashley in his past lives had been a DJ for Radio Derby and had a nice sideline in doing images for book covers.  He was the perfect judge for the evening and really got into the spirit of the event.

The audience reaction was also pleasing, with a lot of laughter when it came up. I also think it is an image that people will remember for a while, which I think should always be one of the aims of any art.  

I didn't put the image in to win, and in that I was not disappointed (although it did score 19). In fact the whole competition was a success, with a lot of imagination from members and any club who are looking for competition ideas I would thoroughly recommend it  as a theme.

However its not really an image that I imagine I will show again, but at least it was a lot more fun than my recent output.  So if you are in a rut, take my advice and try and plan something new, it might just get you going again.

Risky Buisness

The sunrise is out there somewhere

Whenever we take out travel insurance, my wife and I are always amused by the risk categories of the various holiday and sport occupations that are listed. For example, Occasional light manual work is apparently more risky that Rhino trekking, who knew (and does a photography count as "light" work) . Up to now however, I have never seen landscape photography categorized as a risky activity, but maybe travel insurance companies are missing a trick.

Let me explain...

I have been recently in a bit of a fud, photographically speaking. This has been not helped by some of the worse winter weather I can remember as a photographer. Since October, it has felt like all we had either rain, or if not raining, dull featureless clouds. I have recently been putting in a lot of hours at work so I felt a strong urge to just get out and do something. With the weather forecast looking hopeful, I decided to take an almost unheard of impromptu day off.

The next question was where to go. Obviously I would only have the day, so it made sense to go into the peaks. Fortunately at this time of year, the sunrises are still at a time when you don't have to get up at stupid o'clock. So the next question was where?  While I was  tempted to try somewhere new, I decided that was too much of a risk, so i headed for Curbar edge, an area I know well and only 50 minutes away.

Apart from the sunrise I had no real plans, but I decided to take my IR camera in the hope the weather would be good enough. I don't know whether it was that act of hubris that tipped the weather gods against me, but when I arrived 30 minutes before sunrise, it was clear I was not going to get anything. Instead of a ball of fusion generating light and heat, all I had was fog, fog and more fog, completely obscuring the ridge. After hanging around for a while,in the hope the cloud may turn into an inversion, I gave up, went back to the car, had a coffee and a rethink.

After a quick check on the map, I realised I was only 5 miles from Padley Gorge. There I hoped the mist may enter the forest, so give me some nice misty tree shots.

I love the trees at Padley

Padley has become my default go to place in recent years. It has a great combination of forest, hills, and one of the best water courses in the South Peak District. However in this occasion it let me down. The mist was not strong enough to enter the forest, so after an hour of wandering I decided to head down to the river itself to do a bit of white water stuff. Things here were better and while not taking anything that was going to take the landscape photography by storm, it was nice just to be creating.

I decided to take one last shot on a large flat boulder in the stream. I have used this boulder before and provides a good tripod base, while affording a great view up the river.

Now in recent years I have found myself  becoming more risk adverse. In my youth I would go up and down hills, like a  mountain goat on acid. Today I will try and find the easy path, even if that means a detour. However the path to the rock looked easy, so I edged my way over using my tripod as an improvised support.

I don't fully remember the next chain of events. I remember getting one foot on the rock, then the next thing I recall is the sensation of the removal of friction under my feet and then looking up at the sky, with the rest of body and my camera bag immersed in Padley gorge.

The scene of the accident

After I had recovered from the shock of my sudden baptism, I scrambled to the side and up the bank,  and stood there like an overweight Colin Firth just after a dip in Pemberley's s pond. Of course my first reaction was not to check for any injury, but to check my camera. Praying to the gods of weather sealing I turned it on and was relieved to see it respond, probably saved by the fact I had fell on my back.

I decided not to check on anything else, there and then,  and instead left a sodden trail as I walked the half a mile to get back to the car. It was there I decided to take stock. Amazingly my waterproof coat had protected me from the worst of the ingress and only the bottom of my fleece was wet. It had also protected my phone from immersion and it seemed fine. My trousers and shoes were a different story. Fortunately I had a spare pair of waterproof trousers to wear and could swap trainers for my boots. Also luckily, my camera bag had not taken on much water, and even the micro towel inside was dry. However I spread the lenses on the backseat as a precaution.

It was only when I had time to think about it that I realised how lucky I had been. Not so much the potential loss of my kit (which would of been annoying but  replaceable) but the fact I had not injured myself. If I hadn't landed into a deep pool of water (cold but soft),  I could of just of easily fell on rocks and suffered a severe injury such as a blow to the head.

This brings up the point of how much risk it is actually worth taking to get a photograph. With the world of photography getting increasingly competitive and the ability to stand out from the crowd more difficult, the temptation is to go the extra yard to get that dramatic image. Ignore the incoming tide, stand on the quayside in a gale, climb over safety barriers, all these are things photographers, me included, have done in the past.

However I am not sure I want the inscription on my gravestone, "taken too early, but nice photo". Do you?