Planning and preparing for assignment 1.

Due to the COVID epidemic getting photographs of anyone outside my household is proving very, difficult; so for my first assignment I have elected to keep it simple and use my wife and myself as the subjects. The photographers and their projects that have inspired me are Larry Sultan, Pictures of Home (1992) and Tina Barney Theatre of Manners (1997) and Cindy Sherman’s, Untitled Film Stills (1977). Larry Sultan and Tina Barney’s projects both have a domestic theme that I can easily adopt for myself in these challenging times and looking at Cindy Sherman’s work that all appear to be carefully constructed and posed compositions rather than candid snap shots. These photographers probably all used medium or large format cameras on a tripod for a slower working process, I have had to make do with my DSLR with a 35mm sized sensor mounted on a tripod to try to get similar results.

My equipment: A Nikon with a full size 35mm sensor, mounted on a tripod, remote controlled shutter and lighting with modifiers for softer light. I am using maximum possible depth-of-field that I can obtain and using hyper-focus for maximum sharpness. However, I only have small Nikon speedlites; so my aperture control is limited. I had originally thought to just use my 24mm prime lens for probable best exposure options; but in practice this choice wasn’t practical; so I have used my Nikon 24-120, f4.0 zoom lens, keeping to the wider focal lengths for both the context and depth-of-field.

My willing model is my wife and I have asked her to sign a Model Release Form a copy of which is as illustrated below.

Photographs were captured in Raw and with only the minimum necessary editing conducted through Lightroom.