Garth Badger Response

Research

Garth Badger is a New Zealand photographer working in moving imagery and photography. He has a great range of subjects for his work including sports, music, advertising and fashion.

Response

photographic research response

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZauKDSKRlYk

I found this video on youtube about Garth explain how to be a great fashion photographer, in this he shows some great examples of his natural lighting with windows and how emportant lighting and composition is.

I like how in this image you can see the shadows from the windows.

Photographic response

(please ignore my messy windows)


I tried picturing the cat against the window, her face was quite dark so I wanted to brighten it up.



I tried using flash but I didnt like the glare and reflection on the window, it takes away from the picture, I think it would look good cropped out possibly.


I tried again without flashing using a gold reflector to brightnen the cats face. I feel this did a good job and had the effect that I wanted.

After editing, I really like this picture.

I tried a different subject matter this time



This is without flash with natural light


This is the same picture with flash and natural light, it looks better than the cat picture because the glare is on the subject instead of the background, but i dont like the bright line through the center because i think it looks distracting.


This is with natural light in a reflector, it illuminates the wright and brings a little warmth in the image so you can tell what the focus is

This time I tried to use the light for portraiture, faced the light this time and used it to illuminate my face.


just natural light



I used my gold reflector to warm out my face and shadows. I tried different angles to try catch the light as the light was not very direct.




This is the set up I used

Garth has his own studio he rents out called Thievery in K road in Auckland. He was originally drawn to purchasing the building because of the great windows in the building, they really inspired me in my response. I wanted to make use of the light in my house coming from my windows and sliding doors.

I choose this subject matter because these are some of the things to represent what Garth photographs in his studio with portraiture and marketing product photographs so I experimented with these.

For this shoot I was very limited on on the equipment I had, I used my Nikon camera with the standard lens, the natural lighting (but it was a pretty cloudy day as seen from the pictures) and a gold reflector. 

The gold reflector came in handy as the light looked very cold and dingy and there was alot of shadow and not much direct sunlight. I tired the reflector in different angles on my face and the cats. I found that angle that was best was slightly above eye level on the angle catching some sun, it really helped to brighten up my under eyes, and with the cat I held it low down infront of her face catching the sun and it brightened up the shadows on her face illuminating her fur.

I experimented with the light as I noticed Garth had alot of imaged were the model was harsh against the light source so I tried that with the cat (my model for the day) there was alot of shadowing because my light source wasent bright enough because of the cloudy day, so I used the gold reflector to brighten the shadows and warm up the cats face.

I then tried  opposite the light using myself and the window to brighten up my face with direct light like I saw in some of the pictures garth did linked above. I feel like these were probably the most successful pictures light wise because of the the cloudy day but compositionally the cat pictures were the best because there is less distraction background and the gold reflector really makes the image pop.

If I could change anything about this shot it would be to do it on a sunny day with a 50ml lens so I could get more detail in the image and get a closer more detailed image. Next time I might experiment with black and white as alot of Garths work looks great in black and white.