Inspiration Ella Ruth

I found a series of Dance Location Portraits whilst researching, and I think they look lovely, really classy and elegant which is exactly what a dance portrait should look like.  This series is by a Photographer called Ella Ruth.  I have looked at her other work as well and it has given me a lot of inspiration. These two images are my Favourites out of the series.  I would like to do some shoots like this to practice my skills with working with natural lighting on locations.  I love the locations for both these images too, fits perfectly. The positions that the dancer/model is in, is very interesting yet simplistic.  

After looking at these images of the location being the woods, it reminded me of an old shoot that I had done in my first year.  Here are two of the images below which are not edited at all.  I had the model sit in the middle of the tree and I liked the look as if the tree was cradling her in a 'hand' like position, almost reminded me of Thumbelina.  I think that they could be made a lot better with some more preparation and time. If I stick to a Dance theme to my ideas and shoots then I could potentially re-create this shoot but have a dance model posing inside the tree. This is definitely something I will consider and come back to!

I have a lot more inspiration and have been looking at so much dance related fashion photography that I love, and will be sharing very soon. 

Brighton Photo Biennial

Okay, so I'm a little bit behind on my dates, but, on the 16th October we had a Photography trip to Brighton to see the 'Brighton Photo Biennial 2012' and I thought it was a really helpful trip to see some of the galleries in the area and look at the exhibited work.  Here is a quick photo I have taken to show the leaflets/postcards that I collected on the day.  There are plenty of Exhibitions that I would still like to go to in Brighton and in London so hopefully the trip this month to London will help me too.

I went into one of the galleries in Brighton called Gallery40 and saw some work that interested me quite alot and I thought that it would fit well into my initial ideas for my module's. It is the work of Gavin Bambrick and his series called 'Exile'.  Here are the images below;

At first I thought they were sculptures to show emotion and quickly thought they would fit into my idea as working with the Human Body and showing shape and shadows of the body in different light.  I actually had an idea of shooting low key images of the body and work with shapes in a certain light which, in a way would be similar to this work.  But after reading about this 'Exile' series, I found out that it's the work of domestic abuse and how most of the time it is unseen by the public eye, and his work shows the physical and emotional suffering.  Another reason this work has given me inspiration is for ideas towards my Mixed Media module.  Bambrick says that he couldn't find anything to use for his work so then decided to make his own sculptures.  He made these caricature models as realistic as possible to make sure the abuse and violence looked real.

The reason these models/sculptures have given me ideas towards my Mixed Media module is because I had thoughts of creating a sculpture of the human body and include it with my dance/nude idea.  My idea was to create a model/sculpture in a dance pose and then place the model either in the studio or on location and shoot it as if it was a real model.  If i choose to shoot in the studio I could place a big image of mine as the background but I do think it would work better if I actually took the sculpture to a location and shot an image there as my final piece. Its all just ideas at the moment but this work had given me alot of ideas for my Major Practical Project and Mixed Media.