Rejected Practice Shoot Photographs

These are all the rejected prints that came from my practice shoot. Most of them consist of the images being wrong lighting arrangements/settings or the compositions of the models are not quite what I was after.

This photograph shows my trial with the spider legs. Although it took me quite a lot of time to make them, i'm happy to completely not use them. The main reason is that they are completely out of proportion to her body. They also do not look realistic at all, you can clearly tell they have been made, this is not the look I going for. I also do not like her pose, when she is horizontal to the camera like this, her arm can very easily cover her face, with not only covers it, but also creates harsh shadows. I do however quite like the lighting of this shot, the flash hitting the floor really brings out the roughness of the room she is in and forms this gritty feel to the image. 

Props

Roman Helmet –

Because Emma (model acting as Athena) already has a roman dress, I knew that all I needed to get in addition is the helmet. I used eBay again to get myself a Roman helmet, as I knew that party shops in Lincoln would sell them at a much higher cost. I decided to go for the design with the red feathers on top, this give the helmet much more vibrancy and aesthetic value.

Potion Bottles – 

When reading through the story, I decided that I could use a small bottle in a shape and colour that connotates the idea of a ‘potion’ bottle. Although it is fairly small in scale, the fact it is made of real glass will help to hopefully catch the flash in a way to create a glimmer. If it doesn’t, this is an aspect I could easily place in with Photoshop to help it stand out.

Rope –

For the rope, I tried to look in shops such as B&Q and Homebase, but they were extremely expensive and only had large lengths of rope. I decided to look on eBay and found that I had much more flexibility with both the thickness and the length of the rope. I went for a 2m length and a 14mm thickness. The thickness was important for it to look as realistic as possible, whilst the length was important to give me enough to make an effective noose out of. I used a YouTube video tutorial to tie the noose myself.

UPDATED 20^th JANUARY

Spider Web –

After the first practice shoot, I was given the idea of using synthetic spider web that I can stretch across the rough wall behind Arachne (Kathryn). I thought this was a great idea, as it would mean that I could still indicate that she has changed over into the spider, without using the spider legs, which didn’t work very well at all. I ordered 6 packets of the spider web to ensure that I had enough to cover some of the floor below her and also lead it up and around the barred door behind her.

Arachne's Spider Legs

For Arachne’s transformation from human into spider, I though about how I could create a type of addition to her dress to give her spider legs. I found a few spider costumes online, but they looked quite childish and were extremely expensive. I then decided I could try and make the legs, as long as I found the right material to act as an accurate visual representation of the hairy legs you would find on a tarantula.

I found this dress on eBay for sale, I tried to look for the biggest size of dress I could to ensure that I had more material to work with; this was a size 12. To make the legs I used toilet roll tubes and paper in such a way to create thin cylinders to stick the material to.

I then made small incision into the back of the dress that was the same size as the flattened toilet roll tube. This meant that I was able to slot the bare section of the tube into the dress and it would dangle from it, as if looking like spider legs coming from her back.