Lucia Griggi

Griggi is a California based photographer who travelled the world taking photographs, with the intent to inspire people to travel capturing their experiences through photography. Half way into her trip she found an Edge 80 optic, which creates a very soft focus, an effect that drew me to her images.

This statement was taken from Griggi about the below image – “It was pouring rain. Overcast. Storm clouds and bleakness was all around. I shot down the river and between the mist, rain and the soft focus lens, the shot came out very moody and surreal.”

I really liked the wet, close nature of the image so I decided I wanted to incorporate soft focus into my own work to see if I could get a similar soft and atmospheric feel to my images. I decided I would attempt a shoot with soft focus, and the subject matter of the shoot would be smoke grenades; a prop I have wanted to shoot with since my inspiration for my dust shoots.

Before the shoot even began I ran into a big issue. I decided to do the shoot using my A6000. This was an issue as it used a different flash mount to my d3300, so my flash gun wouldn’t work. In addition, the shoot was in the dark in a woodland area,  so without light the shoot couldn’t happen. I got an assistant to repeatedly manually trigger the flash as I captured the images.

Contact Sheet

The instruction to my subjects were simple: keep the smoke grenade moving continuously. The rest I left completely up to them. This was extremely interesting as each subject seemed to have very unique movements they liked to do:

• Subject A (Camo Jacket) liked to cover their face a lot, which creates a secretive and unknown feeling to his images.
• Subject B (Black Jacket) liked to move the grenade entirely above waist height slower than the other subjects, which allowed me to create the smooth gif.
• Subject C (Blue jacket) liked to hold the smoke grenade below waist height and move in a linear motion.

Gif

I used my A6000 for this shoot because it has a high rate of fire, which allows me to capture more images, creating a smoother gif. I really like the way a gif can make a series of images come to life, giving more of a story. The motion of the smoke is smooth and silky, which gives a chilling atmosphere.

I decided to try and use the same method for adding colour to my dust SLR work onto the smoke, as the whole idea to use smoke was based on smoke. I felt that the smoke itself would look dull and boring as i could only obtain white smoke. So I decided that adding colour would make the images come to life more and be more aesthetically pleasing

I imported the images to photoshop. Added a layer with a dramatic rainbow colour gradient, then simply set the layer to colour my image and added a layer mask so it would only effect the smoke. Finally i reduced the opacity of the colour layer to reduce how strong the colours were.

I also made a few passes on the layer mask with a low opacity brush to create highlights and low lights to make it appear more natural and less artificial.

I feel my fourth image was most successful as it look most realistic as i managed to fade the colours as the smoke dissipated making the image look almost real and un artificial.

Finals

I decided to further add to the surreal effect by giving some of my edits a bleached effect. This is when you lighten certain areas of an image or whole images. It can be used to lift highlights or shadow details.

The first image was shot totally differently to the others. I wanted to experiment with back lighting. The subjects were illuminated from behind to create a black silhouette. I really liked the effect this had on my images but my camera found it very hard to focus on the subject. This lead to me switching to a front light for my subjects.

I tried to edit my images in a similar way but changed small things to get some variation. I attempted to draw attention to the centre of the image but leave just enough of the surroundings to add a feeling of mystery. All the images have had varied levels of bleach bypass, which I did to add some more fine detail, and washout some of the colours. However, I played with adding certain colours back in to try and create different feels to similar images.

I felt the blue gave the images a more intensely strange and unsettling feeling when mixed with mild green hues.

This was more successful than I initially thought when I dismissed the idea of using smoke in my work and opted to using powder paint. However the shoot was very time consuming, costly and was fraught with issues like being able to properly operate my flash guns. This has lead me to the conclusion that I should move a way from time as a physical camera setting and more towards a subject matter.

What I most enjoyed about these images is the smoke was an organic free flowing form that couldn’t be controlled, it could be loosely manipulated but never controlled. This is because the smoke is an ephemeral material and only lasts a few seconds.