Kaleido-vision
In the weeks before deciding on my final portrait concept, I experimented with my friend's desk lamps and kaleidoscopic rave goggles with my colour gels and camera flash, because I was interested in in-camera effects. I've seen several creative portraits made with this repeated coloured reflection effect and wanted to recreate it by using these goggles in front of my camera lens. Shortly however, I set aside the sparkly adventures for another time, as I wanted to try something more serious and connected to the theme of identity, as per the brief.
I found that using a wide angle lens rather than a regular 50mm produced better, brighter results, and experimented with the angle, distance and general position of the goggles. I used green and orange gels over some lights which my friend generously lent me for the shoot, and they acted as a model. It was interesting to see how positional changes affected how many versions of the model's face appeared in the images. Using flash removed the floating head effect, revealing the messier background (seeing as this was just shot in their living room), so next time I will procure a more neutral background.
This was a fun and informal shoot just to see what would happen, and while I didn't use this as my final portrait concept, I plan on refining the process and using better lights to achieve some more images in the new year. It could also be interesting to double expose some crystal shots (shown in previous available light post) in post-production over some of the shots. This all encompasses my quite rapidly escalating interest in reflections, mirror images and refraction, which I am currently exploring in my own time (updates in personal research/experimentation posts).
Here are my favourite shots, some globally edited to play with hue/saturation and optimise brightness/contrast:
Crystal
I've previously included some shots using crystals, but here I'll share some adjacent results of the initial test shoot. My partner and housemate kindly let me take photos of them in our garden and my room as I rotated and otherwise positioned one of the many crystals I've bought for photography. Effects are a huge point of interest to me and to achieve these in-camera (or rather, in-lens) was like magic. Electrifying ghost lights, illuminated artifacts, obscure shards, reflections and colourful lacerations give these test images really fascinating and I'm looking forward to refining the use of crystals in my photography.
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