Testing my new home studio (okay, its a garage)

November 6, 2024

Steven Perdikis

In case you’ve missed my other posts where I’ve indicated as such, I’ve moved house. As a result, I have a brand new office room!

Further more, I have a single car garage and a driveway in which to store my only vehicle, which means that like many great failed photographers, I get to use my affectionately named car hole as a studio space on the rare occasion that someone wishes to be photographed by me.

I shouldn’t be so self deprecating, but hey, here I am. With my Godox AD200, a softbox, and another Godox AD200 and a gridded beauty dish, I produced these images of my friend Erin, who is a talented artist in her own right.

We operate in similar circles of thought when it comes to representation and the way that we like to use light, so this is probably the first of many creative endeavours together.

I keep bringing up the fact that I want to do a joint exhibition with her in a space local to us.

The prevailing thought that went through my head while we were working on the image below was a simple one, “this too will fade”. We had some wilted flowers that had been left in the sun, and some simple compositional ideas, before moving onto my favourite materials, fabric, and some other bits and pieces.

Here, Erin posed as a live corpse, wrapped in fabric. The flowers are real flowers, I promise. We had the head-piece deliberately off centre to add to the sense of unease. That’s an ongoing theme in Erin’s work.

Then, we wanted to produce a “bridal” portrait, but with the joys of the wilting flowers. I think we did a decent job of it, and I really like the lighting.

Then finally, we did the same, but with the eyes being a main focal point, and very intentionally having a strong, aggressive, claw like grip on the flowers, offset by the more relaxed, yet still uncomfortable hand on the shoulder. The fact that the single eye is mostly obscured adds to the drama.

Most of my good photographs place fabric over the face, and I relish in the fact that I can still focus on the eye through the fabric. It’s a bit of a fancy trick, but it also requires patience in order to achieve.

This was a (very!) efficient shoot. We shot about 12 frames in total, focusing entirely on composition, pose, and lighting. It was a very true and rewarding collaboration.

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