First Shoot!

I ventured out today into my local town of Darwen, a relatively quiet town consisting of a few modern shops such as Superdrug, Boots and Asda Local, but mainly built up of family business still stuck in the traditional decor of the 80's and 90's. I took this opportunity to document the side of my proposal that shows the time-warp, as I didn't have much luck in Blackpool (more of that later)

Tea at the Cafe

The first thing I photographed was this fairly modern tea set, outside a cafe in my town. Although the cafe itself was relatively dated inside and out, the cutlery was pretty modern, which surprised me a lot! Therefore, this lead me to take a few photographs of the empty tea cup and condiments, thus presenting my first photograph! I took this shot into Photoshop to edit, as it was a bit over exposed (due to a sudden change in light), so I lowered the exposure, heightened the contrast and added some film grain over the top to give it the same film effect that the work of Wim Wenders has. I think this is a very good first attempt at the proposal, although not what I originally intended.

Free Off Licence?

 As I continued to walk through my town, I couldn't help but stop and notice this tired, run down corner shop that I have failed to notice before. This shot was exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my proposal, the dated, un-modernised structures that are still standing today. Wim Wenders photographed at lot of modern (at the time) structures across Paris, Texas, therefore I wanted to show the same structures but in the British 21st Century. I applied the same film grain to this photograph, but did not need to change the exposure, as I had sorted all this out in camera.

Shop Window

My favourite photograph that I have taken today is this one, showing a dated shop window selling art deco lamps and sparkling chandeliers. This caught my eye, as the entire interior of the shop was dated, selling old vintage lamps and box television sets, but the shop window really caught my eye!

Original Image

This was the original image before post production and cropping to the 6x7 format. I took this photograph and really didn't like the composition, but it could not be helped because of the lens I was using. The crop that I have done was a tight crop similar to the image that Yoanne Lemoine had captured of the gypsy window in his set 'Empty Spaces' (see Yoanne Lemoine blog post). However, I will be visiting this location again to re-shoot as I think that with more images and compositions, the photograph will look really good. I also used the film grain effect on here, heightened the contrast and cropped excessively to achieve this shot.

Film Scratches courtesy of struckdumb on deviantART