My Favourite Photographers 01: Lara Jade

So I have a few favourite photographers, naturally, and so have decided that I am going to share these with you in the hope that you take from it perhaps what sort of standard of images and ideas I hope to one day achieve rather than disowning me after seeing how epic I could never become for any want of trying...

(I lay in corners sobbing to myself regularly after checking up on what these guys have been working on lately).

I've chosen three favourites to show you for now, each already pretty well-known in their own right. In these posts you will find some of my favourite images from each and, as always, a fair few words.

I'm starting with a very talented young(er than me and it kills me) lady by the name of Lara Jade.

Lara Jade
Lara Jade is particularly influential. I'll tell you why in a moment...

The image that 'introduced' me to Lara Jade, was this one:

Many people have since tried to 'rip it off' but I remember this one as 'the girl in a birdcage' as it is known, I believe. Also a favourite of fellow photographer, Matthew Stainer.

Lara Jade was interested in photography as of the age of about 15 and started her photography company in West Midlands, England when she was just 17 working to provide images of portraits and for book publishers, etc. but moved to London to expand her knowledge. experience and opportunities I know, I know, it makes it sound so easy, it makes me sick. XD

(One of my absolutely favourite images ever and if you like this, you will love the next photographer...)

She too has a blog which, though incredibly sparse, is infinitely better than this one. I mean really. Why are you still here? Honestly. I mean, I'm so grateful but, you just need to stop wasting your time. Nothing to see here folks, show's over...

This is where you should be:

Lara Jade's Blog

If you don't read it... despite having clearly carried on reading my blog... you'll read from about the beginning of 2010 where Lara Jade decides she's starting a fresh and working on her personal work a little more, plus arranging a few trips to New York to work on some exciting projects. At this point she doesn't realise how much of a journey it will take her on I think as she clearly falls in love with it enough to move out there in 2011!

(Another massive favourite. I ADORE this use of lighting).

She talks of the importance of social media to an artist and makes some valued points on quite how networking is one of the best mediums to get people eye-balling your work. Which is completely and utterly true.

And she is also known from the project in which she went 'head-to-head' with another young and rising photography name, Canadian 'Joey L' in a Photographer 'Shoot-Off' which, frankly, went a bit viral and resulted in an educational DVD!

Lara Jade vs Joey L

The two of them go through the different ways in which they both operate and put together their images under the pretence of travelling the world with several challenges to one-up each other on.

Since then, she has pretty much become world famous as a fashion and beauty photographer and now lives over in New York as of 2011 travelling all over the world working for clients such as Elle, Goldsmiths and Harper Collins and teaching photography workshops for the undeserving lesser humans, such as myself...

N.B. Would accept very expensive Lara Jade photography workshop as future birthday gift. Just sayin'.

Basically, she fah-king amazing.

AND, to boot, she looks like this:

Some people just don't even give the rest of us a chance, do they?

www.larajade.co.uk

Ceri Williams: Mad As A Malkavian

Ceri Williams, the girl with the face, had an idea for a shoot that we'd put off for a really long time because we didn't have the necessary equipment or location.

Eventually, we decided we were going to give it a shot anyway and use what we had.

The original idea came from a character that Ceri played a long time ago in a popular roleplaying game called "Vampire: The Masquerade".

I asked Ceri to sum up what was the concept for this image and here's what she said...

"Summer was originally a character from a Vampire: The Masquerade game. In life she was introverted, socially detatched, curious in a child-like way, until she was kidnapped and killed by a Malkavian vampire. The vampire made a practice of scarring his clan name into the skin of his creations, but unlike most 'sires' he then abandoned Summer. She was later found and taken in by another group of vampires, and one among their number was able to remove the scars from her arm. But later she became terrified that her unknown sire would discover this betrayal, and she took a knife and inscribed the letters back into her arm."

So here we are.

Now then, Summer actually initially was a blonde, child-like, tie-dye wearing, tom-boyish type but for the sake of turning this into a more generic vampire image that people could better relate to, we decided to make her a bit more girly and a bit more obviously vampiric. To get this look, we roped the wonderful and very talented Hannah Lonergan on board for the make-up.

Now Hannah has already done some amazing work, including turning herself into the Corpse Bride and Edward Scissorhands flawlessly and so we also knew that, above and beyond her normal beauty make-up, she would be able to create the scars and handle the bloody task at hand.

We headed to Raven's Nightclub (the same location as the 'Destruction' shoot) and Hannah started working her magics on Ceridwen.

Ceri was getting all made up here and I was fretting about lighting in there...

The problem we were having was that we wanted to shoot indoors here but we had no lighting. Slow shutter wasn't much of an option for it and we were concerned about how the images would come out.

Now, at the time, I didn't have a flash gun, something which has since been remedied but at the time, I had to try with the built-in flash without getting a 'snapshot' style shot. I took a few pictures and played around with the settings a little before going back to find out how the girls were getting on.

Hannah had found a dandy place to hang her bag:

...and Ceri was looking much paler and in need of blood. Which was good. :)

 Now it was time for some bad-ass scarring...

Look at those welts! I was very chuffed at these. I think Hannah did a bloody brilliant job of it...

... Now then. Following the make-up job, we got Ceri into position and effectively covered her in fake blood from the forearm down.

As this was being done, we all had this Malkavian vampire in mind and were running with it. We wanted a modern gothic looking vampire scene but actually, we almost didn't post this at all.

Here is the best image from the shoot:

After seeing the images in post-production, I already knew that we'd come far from the original concept and I wasn't sure actually whether Ceri was going to consider it a successful shoot or not. It occurred to both of us that actually, the image was a lot darker than we had initially anticipated and without the concept, it did just look like a very young girl self-harming and I know, certainly Ceri, was actually quite saddened by that. Especially as the character that this was based on was in fact pretty happy-go-lucky for the most part.

I actually asked her whilst writing this blog to describe how she felt seeing the final image for the first time for you and here's what she said...:

"Chloe sent me the final image before posting it anywhere to ask what I thought. That alone should have been a warning, because Chloe typically likes to keep things as surprises. I opened the picture on my phone and genuinely stared at it for a good few minutes. Normally I do this anyway in a "How amazing does Chloe make me look" sort of way. This time it was more, "...oh. Wow. That's frightening." I really wasn't sure if I wanted it to go online. Without context (and of course I knew the context better than anyone) it seemed very stark and real. In a strange way, it made me see the character very differently. She was fun to play, cute and funny and a bit sad. But seeing it, even in my own face, was something else." 

We did decide to share this all the same as we do still like the image but we have decided to give this another go when we have some time but this time, sticking to the original character concept.

We'd be interested to know your thoughts all the same...