Dress To Impress?
” I dressed myself this way because I try to look a little different and try to make the best of my curves because I feel so frumpy and ugly during the day. I dress for me, I dress to make me feel good.”
“I chose to wear the green top because I think the colour looks nice on me, I prefer the green to the purple but Nicole preffered the other one. The shape of it makes me feel comfortable with my body shape. I dress for me, to feel confident about myself and I feel better about myself when I look nice”.
” I choose my clothes if I like them and they are sort of at least a little bit fashionable, I do it for me and what I like”.
” I think my shoes are pretty even though they kill my feet! I wear what I feel comfortable in so I am happy while I’m out and not worrying what I look like”.
I did have a very rough idea for this theme which I have discussed on my research page, this final idea is slightly similar, but I couldn’t come up with anything solid. So I booked out the photography studio and thought I would see how it goes. I asked a few girls to come in dressed up how they would on a night out. I ended up taking around 300 photos. I had a lot of problems with the lighting, just couldn’t seem to get it right. The girls helped me play around with it and we got it to the best we could and that meant having a shadow, it was a pain because I really wanted to get it right but it was my first time in the studio.
I tried to take the shadows out on photoshop but because I am a bit of a novice at this it didn’t really look right the image looked better with the shadow. It was pretty easy picking out the right photos because most of the ones I have used just seemed to stand out because they seem natural. Most of the images that I have they are all looking into the camera and posing. I did tell them to do this but I also carried on shooting whilst they weren’t paying attention because in this cast the more natural ones work out better.
I am still not 100% sure with what I am trying to achieve. I have put the title ‘dress to impress’, because I wanted to know if the girls felt any sort of power/confidence when they dressed up for a night out. After talking about being on a night out it doesn’t seem to make sense why I have taken pictures of them in a studio, wouldn’t it have made more sense to shoot them on an actual night out? I thought about this after I had been in the studio, but I think I have some quite strong portraits of the girls.
I think if i didn’t have the quotes underneath the images then it wouldn’t make much sense, I would like other peoples opinions just to see what they think, because I am in two minds at the moment. I am going to add more images to this page to just to show how I picked out these ones.
Also I asked the girls to just stand together and chat and do what they wanted, I just took some pictures of them messing around and some of them came out quite nice, also I have some images where I caught them doing their shoes up or putting on some lippy. Some of the images aren’t great but I just thought I would put some on here.
Here are some of the other images I took
