Chloe Sheppard
CHLOE SHEPPARD is a British non-digital photographer who was born on May 7 in 1996, she grew up in a small town just outside of Cambridge which would have fields that would stretch for miles and now living in London she describes it as a 'Crazy contrast'. She specifies in visual art. She started taking the topic of photography seriously at the age of 13 and later on went to the University of Arts in London ( UAL) and then became a very famous photographer. Chloe had always been into the artistic side of the world, she loved drawing, painting, taking photos, making videos but she claims that she could only express herself through photography which is why she pursued a mix of art and photography in one. Her work has been in very many magazines such as teen vogue, NYLON and Dazed and Confused as well as working with singers and feminist ads. Chloe is a well known artist and you may see her work around London or England. Chloe's images are shot with a film camera as she says 'I do not have to edit them; they come out looking exactly how I want. With digital, I could sit there for hours and they still would not look as nice.' Chloe's aesthetic as they say is sort of soft and dreamy and wistful. It mainly includes girls, pastel colors and roses is what Chloe states in an interview. Her work illustrates a relatable conduct to those who view it, an outlet of expression. The inspiration behind Chloe's work is the past as well as the people she surrounds herself with, places she's seen and her greatest inspiration is Lana del rey, who Chloe idolizes. The reason behind Chloe only taking images of females is due to her defying the rules and stereotypes of society towards females. She wants to make girls appreciate themselves no matter the shape of they're legs, size of they're hips, length of they're hair. Which is a very positive and powerful message to spread across to the world. That everyone is beautiful and unique in they're own way.
photoshoot plan
contact sheet (raw images)
This contact sheet is to allow me as a young photographer, to acknowledge the mistakes and errors that I have made whilst taking these images. It can also allow me and others to see what I can improve on. The circled images are the images that look the best and will go on to be further developed on photoshop. As you can see I need to focus on taking images at a better angle, this could create a better contrast for the images, I also need to work on the composition and take more images to enable me to work more freely. For my next set of developments (i.e my re-draft) I need to create a more artistic, collage scented piece of work. The images are very casual as I didn't want them to look forced. I thought that a natural scene would make it more positive and lively. To see that happiness isn't always fake and people don't force their smiles whenever they have a camera at their face. I took a large amount of images, which gives me a wider range of choice and work to experiment with and further develop. Its always good to take a lot of images as you have the freedom to do more and your not constricted. Most of these images are of my friends at their house. I used an app called daze which is a film camera app and that's how I got the pinky shade in my images. I asked my friends to ignore the camera and just carry on what they were doing, this made the images look natural. Which is what I wanted because even though Chloe Sheppard focuses on models, she also portrays her work as bubbly and girly, with pastel colors and positivity which is what I tried to exemplify in my photoshoot.
The definition in this photoshoot is not that visual therefore I would need to edit
these images on Photoshop to improve the pink tone of the imagery and also
make it look as if it were shot on a film camera which means that the texture of the images would have to be grainy, so to do that I would have to go on photoshop and add noise to the images that I have selected to further edit and develop. Through out my work I decided that the mood of my work would be a happy and positive mood, which would therefore mean that the lighting and tone of the images would have to be a soft tone to illustrate the work of Chloe Sheppard.
D e v e l o p m e n t s s e r i e s (1)
For this photo shoot I took images of my friends. Some in their house and some outside to give the images a more nostalgic look. These images have been developed and edited on photoshop where I tweaked the brightness, contrast and exposure and I added 9.15% noise to make the photos look as if they were taken on a film camera. As my first set of developments for the topic of Identity, I personally think that they look okay but there is definitely room for improvement. Firstly, I should make some of the images look less casual and make my friends pose or look into the camera like Chloe does with her work. She takes images of herself or other people but they are always posing. Another thing I should do is to get a film camera or polaroid camera so that for my re-draft developments I can create a sort of Graphic Design type of developments.
These images are intimate closeups of people in embrace and in a comforting atmosphere which then brings out their identity. With this photoshoot I aimed to capture these moments similarily to my artist Chloe. The developments illustrate a soft, low-key aesthetic which collides with the work of Chloe Sheppard. She has varieties of different types of photography, she specializes in Celebrity photography but she collages old images and uses model to create a graphic design piece of work. These images could be improved if I printed them out and layered them ( Like Chloe Sheppard does ) and that would create a graphic design, mixed media style of photography. The most important thing that I need to work on is the lighting of the images and being able to make the photographs look professional and use experiment with different techniques which will enable my learning ability in photography to increase. Some of the images that you can see are in the dark and are different people, an important thing to do for my next photoshoot is to set a pattern so the images don't look random and this will just improve the photoshoot vastly. These images have not been edited that much, I will further develop them to resemble the work of the artist that I am doing, Chloe Sheppard. Her work is very bright and bubbly, and portrays life as unicorns and rainbows whilst also talking about serious matters (such as feminism and the issues with young girls and body dysmorphia), although a lot of Chloe's work looks simple it exemplifies much more in a deeper way and the artist herself is trying to spread her own message which will develop the mind of the younger girls who will see Chloe's work in magazines or around England. Instead of seeing tiny skinny girls and developing unhealthy thoughts towards wanting to be like that, Chloe's hope is to show the people who view her work to love all their flaws and insecurities and not to look up to models on magazines or Victoria secret as it's not good and especially young girls who look at those things will grow up with the wrong mentality and end up with body dysmorphia.
F u r t h e r d e v e l o p m e n t s (experimenting with composition)
These are the images which I selected to further develop on photoshop, as you can see I played around with collaging the work. Chloe Sheppard collages some of her work and adds writing and make's it look really artistic and very mixed media as she's combining both art and photography in one piece of work that she produces. In each development that I created I wanted to exemplify the different emotions. Some of concentration ( development no.1 ), some of pure joy ( development no.3 ). I cropped out some images and only outlined one person and then added them to the collage to make it look more artistic. One thing I could improve on is maybe adding letters and words from magazines to make the developments look more artistic. Firstly, I selected an image and used crop tool to widen the image, then I used the color eyedropper tool which enabled me to choose what color I wanted as the background. After that I selected images that I wanted to be in the collage.
P r o c e s s l o g (1st s h o o t)
Afterwards what you will want to do once you have successfully pasted the image where you want, you press ctrl and t which allows you to move the image around the canvas, stretch or compress the image or even reverse it. You do this with several images and place them where you think suits best. With each layer you click on, you can adjust the brightness and compose it more to match the contrast of the background and the other images. I chose to experiment with the different tools on photoshop such as curve, hue, brightness and contrast etc... I only tweaked the images slightly as they were already edited beforehand. To finalize the collage you want to make sure that you are on background ( not on any of the layers ) and then you want right click on your mouse-pad and click on flatten image ( on the right hand side, circled in red ). To flatten an image on photoshop means to merge all the visible layers to the background layer so it all becomes one image, this also reduces the overall size of the file.
Process log's help show the steps of how to create the work you made. In this first image, I used the quick select tool on photoshop ( the shaded tool on the left is the quick select tool ). Afterwards, I selected the part of the image that I wanted to then paste onto my collage. The way I did this was I pressed ctrl and c after that to enable the image to go onto the collage, I had to press ctrl and v that's a shortcut on any laptop or computer to copy and paste. With regards to selecting the image and what you want to cut out, to be able to quick select the image it's crucially important to remember that you are on background otherwise it will not work and you will be unsuccessful with regards to cutting the image.
C o n t a c t s h e e t II ( R A W i m a g e s)
This is my re-draft photoshoot where I took images of images, I used my phone to capture old pictures of my mother when she was younger and some of my other family members. The reason for the images being so small, as you can see is because they are old pictures, some from a photo-booth film of 4. The interesting thing about doing this kind of photoshoot is the creativity that flows through your imagination when seeing old pictures like these. It is also quite interesting to see what your family members looked like when they were your age or a little bit older. Although this photoshoot didn't require much to do other than photograph old images, I was lucky enough to have the access to old pictures like these. I chose to focus this photoshoot mainly on my mother.
D e v e l o p m e n t s s e r i e s (2)
P r o c e s s l o g (2nd shoot)
These images were developed similarly to the previous developments. I used the same tools: quick select, rectangular marquee tool, as well as using shortcuts on the key board i.e. ctrl + c. It was a bit harder to quick select these images as they're not as clear as my previous images. The tone for these images was darker then my first set of developments. Because a lot of the images have a sort of brown-grey tint those are the colors I chose to work with in this photoshoot. I took images of old photographs of my mother and some other family members. The reason for these images being so small is because the photographs themselves were 2 by 6 inches as they were images from photo strip shot from a photo booth. First thing I did is I selected the image ( either by quick select or the marquee tool ) and then I copied and pasted it on an empty canvas that I colored using the eyedropper tool on photoshop.
The next thing I did after I pasted the main image onto my canvas is I selected other images and moved them around, I chose to vary the style of the images i.e. some of them as a whole image and some of them cropped so it's just the face. I thought that by doing this it would make the image look more like a collage and it slowly progressed in the sense of the developments looking like collages. Another technique that I experimented with in this photoshoot, is I chose to overlap the images and make them look like I took a picture of images just layered one on top of the other. The way that I did this on photoshop was I firstly selected all the images I wanted ( you can use the quick select tool or the rectangular marquee tool )and put them as layers on that one image. I then adjusted the proportion of several of the images
F u r t h e r d e v e l o p m e n t s (experimenting with collage)
With these further developments, I focused on what I did with the first set of Developments that I did, which is making the work resemble Chloe Sheppard's work and to make it look like mixed media work ( a mix of art and photography ). I used a new technique on photoshop where it looks like the images have been laid on top of each other, I did this by dragging each layer to the 1st layer, this caused the layers to overlap and make it look like more of a natural layout.
E x p e r i m e n t i n g w i th d i f f e r e n t s t y l e s
To link with my next artist ( David Hockney ) I experimented with the same technique and style. I used the pipette to get the background color where I then edited on my images. This was to see if I was able to do the work of David Hockney on my collage styled artist Chloe Sheppard. Therefore I only edited a few images and further edited my collage style images, considering that is what Chloe Sheppard links to.
EXPERIMENTING WITH PHYSICAL COLLAGES
These images are photos I took of my collages. I printed the images that I took of my prints, cut them out and then stuck them on colored A3 pieces of cardboard sheets.To make some of them unique as well I added ripped up pieces of tracing paper and writing. Chloe's collages are very neat and well preserved, her black marker makes the writing look almost perfect and aesthetically pleasing with the way that she laid it out. Furthermore, I tried to comprehend this and implicate similar work to Sheppard.
further edits - experimenting with hue and overlay
I decided to further develop the collages I created on photoshop, I chose to change the colour, I created pieces that link to David Hockney (joiners and experimenting with mixing photography and cubism). I changed the background to match the style of the images of themselves. I also used the technique of mirroring and blending images, by layering other images.
c o l o u r c h a n g i n g u s i n g g i f s
To present the difference of the image being dependent on colour I chose to portray this in a gif, where all different types of colours are presented. The gif was was easy to make, I save the images as JPEGs each time I change the hue and saturation on the image, I change it by 10 each time (-10 or +10). The speed/animation was set at 300milliseconds so its not too slow or fast and demonstrates how vast the colour of the images can stand out. I created this gif on a website called : gifmaker.me