Today Nicolette and I did a shoot with Ted and Hamish who created Pink Lemon. Nicolette had previously filmed them but had a few issues with the white balance and audio aspects of the shoot. We’ve also had a few scheduling issues revolving our initial subject Cat and she is unavailable to shoot during our time period before the end of semester. As such, we have decided to form our final project (and the basis for other future portraits) on Ted and Hamish. We do this will the consciousness to later shoot with Cat sometime in the near future, as she will be a featured artist in the magazine ivy ii. Our sole purpose for this semester has been creating our portrait ‘recipe’ and this change makes our work more adaptable. This perhaps will allow us more time to perfect our skills, as we are able to conduct multiple shoots with Ted and Hamish – where as Cat was more restrictive with her schedule. When we do shoot Cat, the additional practise and awareness we can gain from these initial exercises will prove crucial, particularly when pushed with unpredictable variables in unknown environments.

Today we used a Song x200 and two lapel microphones, and were able to put into effect the skills we have learnt throughout the semester, primarily in the concern of creating a composition. We took a lot of care with what was in our frame, took time preparing the image. This included leveling the camera in an interesting and coherent way, removing unnecessary objects from the shot (such as cords and rubbish bins) and moving the couch (and consequently the subjects) away from the wall. This last point was an interesting one that Paul reiterated, as it almost effortlessly removes the back shadow behind the artists and eliminates the need for a strenuous lighting set up to achieve this. In terms of sound, were able to explore audio clearly with Nicolette dedicating herself in the shoot to listening and hopefully this will be reflective when we enter the editing suits to frame our work. I also finally got my Canon 70d back from repairs and used this today to get some differing angles to the x200. We are optimistic that the combination of quality audio and the more visually engaging aspects will work in our favour in this exercise.