Annie Leibovitz and Jason Christopher.

I have decided today that i will do some research into the fashion photographers Annie Leibovitz and Jason Christopher.

Annie Leibovitz started her career as a fashion photographer in 1970 when she became a staff photographer at the newly launched Rolling Stone magazine. Three years later she was named chief Photographer at the magazine by the magazines publisher Jann Wenner, she held this job for ten years and it was her intimate photographs of celebrities that helped to define the rolling stone look.

Above are three of her photographs that were used as the covers for the magazine. 

I hope to be able to create intimate photographs of the band/person chosen to photograph. This way the viewer can get a 'feel'  for who the person/people in the image is. 

I like how Leibovitz is able to get up close and personal with the music artists that are posing for the magazine cover. When it comes to creating my own images for this part if the assignment i hope to be able to imitate this closeness between the camera and the model i like how some of the poses could have been created to show the personality behind the band on the cover.

The next photographer i have decided to look into is the work of Jason Christopher who is a fashion photographer based in Los Angeles California. His wok has been described as classic romantic and clean these have been said to be three main qualities of a good photograph. it was during his period of work with Jerry Avenaim that he worked on his technical skills as a photographer. his work has been likened to that of French painter Degas and the Italian master of artistry Leonardo Da Vinchi, in the way that he uses clean classic lines that are similar to those used in fine art.

I like the way his images compliment the fashions that he is shooting and the way the images show an elegance even if the third image seems a bit wild. I do however think that the images could look even better if they didn't have a plain back drop, for example like the first of these three images even though its a prom dress thats being photographed i think the woodland backdrop works really well with the rough hem line of the dress.   

HD flip video

Here is the short video i that i recorded using the HD flip video recorder, a new gadget brought by the college for us to experiment with. 

Here is an image of the flip ultra HD camera i used. 

Its a very useful little gadget as it is simple to use, the buttons are fairly simple, as the big red button you can see is how you stop and start the recording. Playback is is quick and easy. Before you start to record, the camera itself has two hours of recording time before you need to upload your videos to a computer.

Location Shoot images.

As there were not enough computers to go around we went out into Burton and the surrounding areas to take some pictures. Here are a selection of the images that were taken. this was just to give us an idea of how the pictures would look like if we chose these areas for our actual proper location shoot. there are many other locations that we could choose however in the time we had we could not explore anymore.                                                  

Tony vs. Paul stop motion research.

During the lesson on a Wednesday, there are four separate  groups in the one room, however there are not enough computers for us all to use them. In order to solve this problem two groups stayed in the main room and two groups went off into another room, so that there were enough computers for everybody. After moving rooms and logging on I went onto youtube and typed in stop motion to the search box, here i found        the Paul vs' Tony stop motion video which you can find above.

This video must have taken a while to make due to the amount of different scenes there are present in the short film. The people must have also had rather good balance as most of the time the actors are balancing on one leg.

Stop Motion video made in pairs.

After researching into stop motion videos myself and the other sam (samnellist.blogspot.com) created our own stop motion video. Overall we took about 79 pictures just to make this 15 second video.

selecting our chosen genre/artist.

In order for our group to decide upon the genre/artist behind our inspiration, we took a trip to the local hmv store to view CD covers from a selection of artists. We eventually settled upon Katy Perry, as we liked the image she put across to the younger generation. and it would be interesting to recreate a similar style.

We chose these Katy Perry, because her album and single covers are a lot more colourfull and attractive when compared to artist such as NDubz, Miley Cyrus and Rihanna.

The above image is of the CD cover we had to produce during class, using a random image from flicker, the first random article title from wikipedia; and finally the last four words of the first quote that came up on wiki quotes. To complete the look i put all the elements together using photoshop.

Band Identity. Research into the use of photography to advertise bands.

Over the last few years, the use of photography in advertisements has become more and more popular. Through means of posters, magazine covers, branding and album covers.

The use of photography with artists such as Katy Perry, in their album covers tend to show the personality behind the songs on the album.

this album cover styled  by Markus Molinari and Johnny Wujek. The use of the props used helps to show how her music can flexibly fit into other genres of music. Katy Perry is also known for her abstract costume choices.

This photography taken at the Grammy's in february 2009 shows how Katys Fashion statement gives her the ability to appeal to not just the younger generation, but to those in their late twenties and early thirties. Although I myself did not like her choice of outfits her music is of a very 'catchy' veriaty and can have you humming it in the street without you even noticing that you are doing it.