I looked into Frank Ocean's magazine, Boys Don't Cry, for inspiration for my motor-themed ideas. Frank's imagery surrounds many similar themes, such as toxic masculinity and inspiration from racing and motorbikes.
I loved the use of both simple portrait photography and coloured blurrier images and would like to incorporate both these styles within my shoot, using this as an opportunity to start experimenting with film photography alongside digital. For my shoot I want a studio location, with a plain white background that I can overlay with coloured lights, to show my helmet in full. I also love the use of side portraits and the masculine 'bad-ass' styling and want to take this into consideration for my shoot.
Once I finally received all the equipment to create my prop, I started taping the feet onto the helmet. Originally, I wanted to disperse the feet randomly around the helmet but while laying out the feet I felt it would photograph better if the feet were mimicking a mohawk. I really loved the way the helmet turned out and feel it meets my customer's needs for niche, tongue-in-cheek imagery. If I had more time and a larger budget I would of loved to continue with developing different helmets with other themes but decided because I'm behind I should move on to keep my project moving forward.
For my shoot, I experimented with both film and digital photography with a vintage film camera I hadn't tested yet. I projected coloured lights with gels onto my subject, inspired by Boys Don't Cry, and styled him with a tassley suede jacket to portray masculinity. I also experimented with different settings on my digital camera including changing the shutter speed and covering the lens with homemade pinholes. Overall, I like how these images came out, however, I'm not sure if I didn't use the correct settings on the film camera or if it's broken because none of the images came out clear and were all double exposed. However, I still like the way these came out as they were interesting and colourful, showing similarities in the overlayed Boys Don't Cry imagery, but because I don't want every shoot to have this effect I need to make sure for the next shoot the camera is working properly.
Digital:
Film:
