Trying to plan the photograph

Thursday 24th September 2020

So today my plan was too take some conceptual pictures however, soon after I started my camera ran out of battery so I had to charge it. It will probably be two more hours before it is fully charged, but then again, do I need it to be fully charged?

In the mean time, I will just talk about my idea so far. I am stuck between two different ideas and so I want to plan them out see which one I like better and which one is more possible to complete. I am going to take some pictures of the proposed filming locations and try to consider the lightning because that is one of the most important things in the painting and it is essential to include as it is the motif that Edward Hopper very often used in his paintings.

I am unsure as to whether I should try and ''rent'' out a camera from the school or not. I don't really know when I would be needing it for yet and cameras will be hard to get because they have to wait 72 hours before being allowed to be borrowed again. Maybe I should consider phone filming? I wonder what elements that could bring into the image. I searched up about it a bit and I realised it is a lot bigger than I thought it was. Really I could just use my own camera, I just don't it would be as good as a borrowed camera from school. I think it is best to stick to the middle option; not too great, not too bad. My phone's camera quality is extremely bad so it is best to not risk the outcome of the photograph with something that could easily be avoided. I don't really see any positives except challenging myself.

The two ideas I am still thinking between are changing the narrative and modernising the image or creating an image that seems to be the opposite of the painting. I had another idea but decided not to go with it and instead to merge with one of the current ones I am thinking about. I will go into more detail.

The idea that I decided to scrap was the idea to just modernise the painting. Instead of a night gown, the model would wear pyjamas or something. There wouldn't be an open window and perhaps there would be more people around the main person but you would see that the model still felt alone and they might also be on their phone. It wasn't a bad idea, I just didn't want to go with it but I might still take some trial pictures of the scene. The location would be a living room. With this idea, I just thought about as many details that I noticed in the painting and I tried to modernise them.

I wanted to change the narrative but I don't really know what I mean by that. I guess I sort of want to change it from a lonely woman to a lonely boy or something like that. I think the location would be outside during midday and with this idea, it is a mixture of the other one and the previous version of its self with some things changed. Even with this, I want to try and still capture the same mood. For this I would need the face to be obscured (but I don't want to edit the image so I don't know how I will do that yet), the expression to be ambiguous and a lack of daytime clothing to represent unpreparedness or being in no hurry or just not going anywhere for a while which I think is a key point in the painting.

With the opposites thing, I am not fully sure what I am trying to do with this one. This idea is just me trying to think of every detail that I can and choose the opposite to try and create the opposite emotion but maybe still hiding the real emotion. I am looking at doing one or more of the following:

• From loneliness to happiness (at least faked maybe) - changing the mood

• Opposite colour scheme

• Gender

• Number of people

• From comfort to no comfort

• From closed (body language) to open (body language)

• Change light and darkness

Apart from that, I have been thinking of props, the ones I think I might need so far are a mask made from paper, 1 or more models, a flashlight or two and related clothing. They don't seem too hard to get.

In the next post I hope to have taken pictures of my work so I can make a slideshow of it so that it can be seen instead of just words to read, there isn't a lot but it is at least something.