Proposal for personal project

In this section of work I propose to produce some images of my garage gym and the people who use it which include family and friends. My reasoning for doing this is because I’ve loved to go to the local gym since I was 14 and with the recent addition of my own gym gear, the rest of my close family and friends have followed suit which has provided us another way to bond and have a laugh. To achieve this idea I’m planning on using a 6D to help plan and structure my light setups and finally a bronica 6x4.5 medium format camera to produce the final black and white images. I’ve chosen film over digital for this because my recent efforts with the Hasselblad medium format have been a success. Secondly the clarity and the tonal range from the medium format cameras creates a more personal image which I feel is appropriate for this work.

I will be using lights which will be natural, flash and constant artificial light which will provide me with more than enough options to create my images. Because I want to present around 10-15 images, I will print on 12x 9.5 gloss paper so the printed images are large enough to be viewed in detail, but also small enough so they can be presented together without them being too imposing. I chose this number because it will allow a good variety of imagery which will be needed because there will be at least five different people featuring within the pictures. With the main theme being the gym, the sub theme is portraiture because it ties into the main body of work that I have produced earlier in the year, but mainly because it’s the best way to document the people that use the equipment. To help document this I have considered the work of Yousuf Karsh, David Bailey, Richard Avedon and Jai Catalano. Each of these photographers work can help me construct my own photos by teaching me about composition, in particular framing and also how they’ve used light which will be important because I’ll be taking the photos in doors. I will also find work from others on google images which is just as important because they will give me a good indication to what it is possible to achieve with the objects the equipment that I own and generally what looks good and what’s not.