ANALYSIS
I worked with Lauren again on this shoot and she's always great to collaborate with. She shared creative ideas while letting me play with the concept. Her skills in lighting and photography meant that I didn't have to use any post production on the images, except for adding the odd image to the background. I want the skin to really stand out of these photos so that is another incentive for me to not use photoshop on this shoot.
I used my own hands in the shoot because they are lined and textured and I thought it would be beneficial to showcase natural diverse skin as well as the unnatural. It also makes for an interesting aesthetic. I took inspiration from vitiligo and birthmarks and used makeup to recreate this type of patterning. The cutesy background colours cast a pleasant delicacy on hands that may been seen as not ideal were they in another situation. I was not the best hand model, however, and kept shaking throughout the shoot meaning that a lot of photos were unfocused. Lauren was patient and helped me to keep my hands steady in front of her camera.
The pink background that Lauren and I agreed on reminded me of a relevant trend that I had seen on WGSN and I thought the two would work really well together. The "Graceful" theme has been referenced in a previous post and revolves around a pastel colour scheme, focussing on pinks. Incorporating this into my shoot really gave the images a modern, cutesy edge which is popular with my artsy target audience, giving me more of an edge when maintaining their interest. Soft Pop built spun this theme through collage and popular culture "sticker" like appendages. I want to ply with this to see if its something that can be incorporated into my own work.
Above is one of the final images, to which I have applied the editing techniques as stated above. I did this by duplicating the daisy that is on the ring of the index finger. The daisy print is extremely popular with my demographic at the moment, so it will appeal to my target audience and also ties the shoot together and is aesthetically pleasing. I haven't photoshopped the skin itself to maintain the authenticity of the texture.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS
I realised that absolutely love making up and shooting hands. They're all so singular, yet they're all the same. They move differently, the skin fits them differently on different people, some are aged, lined, soft, dry, the diversity is infinite. I wanted to test some more while was was with Lauren so I went back to the Silver Line shoot from the beginning of the project. I have made the conscious devious not to photoshop these images bar for the backgrounds in some cases. This is to show the authenticity of the texture of the skin which I feel really gets to the core of the subject.
