Evaluation
Our task for our photography part of our course's theme was Film Noir, Film Noir is usually set in the 1940's during the second world war but the setting for Film Noir is usually in american cities in places like L.A and New York the clothing style in the 40's was usually suits and ties and fedora hats and for the women were casual dresses, rather formal dress compared to modern day outfits.
For my research i used references from movies such as The God Father and Gangs Of New York which aren't in a black an white style but its got the same setting as Film Noir and use some of the same styles such as clothing an dialogue. i looked at the lighting affect and the movie quality, i also went on to google and looked at other peoples Film Noir photos and picked put some of the ones i liked main on that stood out to me was a photograph of a poker table with alcohol and cigarette's and to me i thought the lighting and the positioning was nice and it really took in the essence of Film Noir.
There are multiple techniques that goes into Film Noir to help create the unique style. The main part of Film Noir is the lighting which helps create the mysterious effect. The main lighting needed is Key light which this is usually the brightest and most dominant light of a setup. Complementing the key is the Fill light, which is place opposite of the key light to fill in some of the shadows left by the key. The final light of the three point setup is the back light, this light adds an outline to separate the subject from the background. More techniques are thing such as directing the light using barn doors and creating a shutter effect by using templates to put in front of the key light.
The ideas that i had used some of the more simpler effect in them, my first picture i found was a man leaning against a wall with the shutter effect over him, i had to scrap this idea during the final photo shoot as i couldnt get the right shutter effect. I then found a photo of a more modern film noir photo using someone in an anonymous mask and a hoodie and yet again i had to scrap this idea due to me not able to get the mask in time. My third idea consisted of a table and a man holding a glass of alcohol and the lighting only showing a small amount of his face, this became rather challenging to recreate so i had to scrap this idea too. My last idea of failures was my poker set idea its showed a great photo with alcohol and cigarettes and good film noir knowledge which then i had to scrap because i didnt own a poker set anymore. My last ideas that actually worked was just of people posing against walls and was really just plain.
During the photography we had a lot of things to keep into account the biggest issue i had was trying to find the perfect location that was dark but not too dark and where there was an area with a nice brick wall. This became challenging to find dark rooms that weren't being used but eventually i found one and i took a couple of shot that came out pretty dark unfortunately as there wasn't any plug sockets for a red head to plug in so we used a torch light on a phone.
My test shots and my actual shots are far different from each other due to the inconveniences that was made during the process, but my test shot did help me find a good ISO and aperture to capture all the darkness into the shot which helped with my final pictures.
The editing process was rather easy all i did to the images was turn the saturation and brightness up and turned it dark and that was my final image done all i had to do now was crop it to size add it to a black background and add some words and images to it.
Things that i would do differently is use props that i know i have and find better areas in college and outside to take pictures, i personally dont like the Film Noir project that was set us as the photos we were tryign to recreate were done in proper studios and we didnt have the resources for it.
