Half way!

So I took the photos yesterday of the graffiti artist! As he wants to remain anonymous he shall be known as Dave. The location was absolutely amazing so I decided to do an establishing shot for the project, this is something I intend to do for the tattoo artist as well to keep it going as a flowing sequence. 

In the images I kept Dave anonymous, as to his wishes obviously but also found them to look more intriguing then having a clear view of his face. I think this is because unless you are a close friend of the artist, you don't know who has done that piece of graffiti so can only admire. This can also be said for tattoos, unless you either know the 'tattoo-ee' or go up and ask them then you can only admire the artwork really.

Right, so onto the actual images I took. I attempted to try and recreate Keegan Gibbs style where the subject had slight motion blur but obviously this was difficult without a tripod (the location involved a lot of climbing which meant it was tricky to take one with us). I then found this brilliant filter from a company called 'Alien Skin Software' called 'Exposure 3', it's something that I've wanted for a long time as I love the look and feel of traditional film but just haven't had the funds to buy the film and develop it commercially. 

So here are my two attempts to try and recreate Keegan Gibbs motion style.

To be honest I'm not 100% sure whether to discard them or not, any thoughts?

Then there was one that I really didn't like cause of the composition really...

I also found MASSIVE problems with focusing. My D3000, as much as I love it, just won't auto focus with my 50mm 1.8 which is soooooooo frustrating! So I found it very difficult to distinguish whether Dave was in focus or if it was the wall behind him. (You'll be able to see from my contact sheets Mike!)

For editing my chosen images, I used a technique that one of my favourite photographers Rosie Hardy talks about in a recent 'Wedding FAQ' post on her blog. She uses the free software called GIMP but from using both Photoshop and GIMP myself it was capable in both. Rosie talks about what she uses to control the tones and colours of her photographs,

"For tones, I just stick to curves. For colours I use curves too - occasionally, occasionally I will dodge/burn at a very low opacity with a large fuzzy brush but mainly on the BWs. I make selections, feather them and adjust them separately rather than adjusting the tones on the image as a whole. It gives you more control over how the picture comes out and allows you to create some depth."

I took this idea of making selections of separate elements of the images and adjusting the tones of them and found, although it was time consuming, it gave me so much more freedom to show what I want the viewer to look at and concentrate on.

I also used the Exposure filter in order to add some grain and 'roughness' to the images. Here are some before/after shots.

Oh yeah, I also did one last shot to show the final outcome, this is again something I hope to capture at the tattooists (or the stage its at when the client leaves at least).

Any feedback would be great! Thanks!