Shoot 5 - Studio Still Life - Hair
Planning
I decided to do a shoot solely looking at the hair I have been collecting throughout this project. The interest in this is that I want to capture the hair itself, the movement it makes, the texture it holds and the shapes it creates when left to fend for itself. This is hair collected from both hair cuts and hair brushes, meaning that the hair is still quite soft and easy to move around. For this shoot, I wanted to create these images so the whole focus was solely on the hair itself, away from the body, supposedly gross but looking beautiful.
Mamiya Leaf
Film
I feel like this shoot was one the of the best so far, it was so good to work with a material that was so malleable and easy to position that I feel the images succeeded my expectations. I started off using natural lighting from the window in the studio and realised that I wanted to spotlight the hair, to really show it was the main focus of the image. I used a soft box light to point light from above, as if it were this odd light coming from the heavens, shining on this magical hair. All the Mamiya Leaf images were experiments and successful ones, and then I recreated the images again for Hasselblad medium format film, which picked up the colour very strongly and seemed a little more over-exposed than the Mamiya images. Although this happened, the colours the Hasselblad captured were amazing, with the bright reds and greens, merging together, picking up on a previous idea of mine in that hair colour helps to create someones identity as well as hairstyle. I played around with he hair, creating different shapes, some were created by accident when playing the hair on the table without thinking, and others were very composed. I specifically made the images of the hair falling over the edge of the table as I thought they looked like hair falling down someones back, and it made the images look as though they were inferred portraits, rather than still lifes. I am definitely going to continue shooting this hair in the studio, creating shapes with it, moulding it into positions that slightly humour why one dislikes hair once it is off our head. I will also try using different backgrounds and less harsh lighting in these still life shoots too so that my images all suit each other and can be seen as a body of work together, and also so the hair is seen easier, as the light only captures certain sections of the hair right now.