So for tonight I am digging into the past, as I have mentioned in a previous post I used to belong to the local Camera Club and every couple of months we used to have studio evenings. This entailed the setting up of studio lights and having one or two models to pose for portraits, some of these young ladies were quite used to this but others were complete novices. The format used to be the lights set in the centre of the hall with a chair in the middle for the model to sit on. What followed was something I found very disturbing, a girl on a chair surrounded by 30 - 40 people all clicking away and asking her to move this way or that way, to look up or look down in what was a photographic free for all. I felt this was very degrading for the poor soul and would not take photo's under these circumstances if I even bothered to turn up at all. By the end of these sessions they either looked very intimidated or bored to tears. Now one of my favourite subjects in photography used to be portraiture but I can say from these evenings I only ever took 9 photos, and tonight's post is one of these. This model I think her name was Vannessa but I am not sure was standing around while the lights were being tested, I was checking the focus on my camera when she picked up a hat that was a prop put it on and glanced at the lights,I pointed the camera and took a shot before she took the hat off and looked away. This was the only photo I took on that evening back in 1980, and it has remained one of my favourite images.
The second image is the same one which I decided to play around with in 1995 on my first computer and an early version of Photoshop. I wanted to do something slightly surreal. First I gave the image a light Sepia tone and then with layers and masks proceeded to colour the different parts of the image and finally merged and flatten them. As a first attempt I was quite pleased with the result Finally just to add I processed the film and scanned the negative onto my PC in 1995
