Plan:
Following on from the ACCU shoot I did where I made metal nuts look as if they were floating in mid air; I plan to use the same technique but this time I will change some things to make the photos have a deeper meaning. I am going to do this by creating a picture which illustrates how the excessive use of social media can negatively impact young peoples mental health.
As a final outcome from this shoot, my aim is to produce a dimly lit picture of someone sat on the floor using their phone with a variety of social media logos surrounding them. My plan is to photograph someone young as I feel that the age of the model can reflect how such quickly evolving and demanding media trends can influence young minds and in turn, have a strong effect on the future of society as a whole.
Shoot:
These are the photos I took in the studio. I made sure to use a young person as the model like I previously planned, and directed them to position themselves as if they were using their phone (making sure their screen brightness was at maximum). The reason why is chose to use a black background for this shoot was so that the light from the phone screen was the only thing illuminating the models face. I also figured the social media icons that I would be adding to the image would look better against a darker background.
When I was editing one of my best photos, I started off by adding each of the logos (all downloaded from Google) on individual layers. I made a choice to position them all to look as if they were rising out of the phone -playing around with their sizes to imitate them growing as they get further away from the screen. I then made them all look 3D in FX (making sure that the lighting direction/intensity was correct on each of them) and also added an outer glow on the outside of each icon using the main colours from the logo itself. For the background I lowered the brightness, slightly increased the saturation, darkened the shadows and finally, made a second cropped version of the final photo as I think both frame shapes look really good.
Overall, I think this shoot was successful as I feel the final image can be interpreted as showing how social media -even though all it is considered to be is just apps on the screens of technological devices- it can sometimes leave the screen and leak into the daily lives of anyone using it, affecting them in real life; Not only in the present but in the future as well.