Aidan Dunbar

Working in groups of three, present three JPEG images of shoes at 3PM. Consider a theme and at least one image must have a body part in it. Perhaps think how you will appeal to a specific shopper or audience.

After a brief flirtation with full length black & white portraits, complete with dramatic shadows, the group settled on doing something a little less Photoshop reliant (the original concept was to have a set of images very much like Estelle’s American Boy video her shadow is doing something different on the pure white background) and more shoe oriented.

I mentioned an old photo I took back on my previous course so we tried a similar lighting setup. While it looked interesting the effect just wasn’t working quite as well as it could do with the high heeled monster we borrowed from another group using the studio at the time. Other group members suggested glass reflections and silhouettes which resulted in the fish tank being brought down from the mezzanine for use as a base.

Eventually, we ended up with this series of images with a red gelled 580EX II flash lighting a black paper roll on the background and a long thin softbox in the horizontal position in front to light the shoes and give large specular highlights. Spill could have been controlled a little better on the right hand side of the tank and locking the camera down on a tripod would have been beneficial in consistent composition.

While there is no doubt that these are visually rich images I’m not sure that they meet the theme criteria effectively. Yes, they look the same, and that is exactly the point. There is no variation between them, and therefore in my opinion we could have done better.

(We had a latecomer join our group, so we had to turn in four images instead of three, just in case you were wondering.)