Collaboration with Ellie Wildman

Ellie Wildman is a 2nd Year Photography student at the University of Leeds. Her work usually centres around cinematography and experimental photography.

She approached me on Instagram and asked if I would show her the emulsion lift process as she has recently acquired a polaroid camera.

We spent a day walking around Leeds looking for good locations to shoot. I showed her my work and artist such as Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman to give her an idea of the sort of images that I am trying to achieve.

This was the first shoot that I have done without referencing a specific film. I tried to create photos that look like film stills but are completely constructed and composed.

While I think that some of the images worked well, I still want to spend more time planning my shots out. I want to find a location and do test shoots with a model on a DSLR camera to ensure that I am going to get the most out my images.

After shooting with Ellie, I have realised that I would much prefer to plan my shots through sketches and images using my DSLR camera to experiment with varying models, outfits, locations and poses.

My main worry is that I have very limited amount of shots on the polaroid and it is too expensive to experiment more with the same pose using polaroid. For example, a few of the shots I took of Ellie were very under exposed and the composition wasn’t the best. However, this was only a quick shoot to get the images so I could teach Ellie how to emulsion lift.

Moving forward, planning my shots and using my DSLR or even iPhone to test shots is going to be the best option and I think it will move my work to the next level.