Spot the Difference

In this task we were asked to produce an image in the style of another photographer, this could be any photographer famous or not.

I started to think about what type of image I wanted to produce and thought about what I wanted in my images. I decided that I would like to create some fairy images but not fantasy, I wanted to create realistic fairy images.

When researching about 'fairy photographers' I found it very hard to obtain any information that wasn't to do with fantasy work. However I stumbled across the Cottingley Fairies which were the exact type of images I wanted to produce.

Cottingley Fairies 

The Cottingley fairies are found in a series of images (the first two being produced in 1917) produced by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley. The images were seen by the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Strand Magazine. Public reaction was mixed, some believed the images to be real, others declared that they were fake. In the early 1980's the girls admitted that the photographs were faked using cardboard cutouts of fairies, copied from a popular book at the time however the fifth and final photograph caused some arguments between the girls as Frances continued to clim that this one was real, both gils also argued over the fifth, as they both claimed that they took the image.

This is an example of one of the Cottingley fairy images. The model is dressed in a floaty top with flowers in her hair, this adds to fairy feel. The pose of the model leaning on her hand, she seems relaxed and not affected by the fairies dancing around in front of her. I like the graininess to the image, which gives it an aged quality. 




I started to think about producing a Cottingley Fairy image of my own. I chose a subject with long loosely curled hair, similar to that of the subjects in the original images. I chose to shoot the images on location in a grassed area copying the style of the original images. 

This is the image that I first produced after looking at the fairy images. I really like the pose of the model, looking down onto the fairy, she looks very relaxed and happy to be with the fairy. I chose to change the image to black and white, matching the style of the original image, I also added a higher grain to the image to give it aged feel. The only thing I don't like about the image is the lack of the detail in the fairy. I actually Stuck the image of the fairy onto a printed image of the background with the subject. I think this is one of my mistakes. I wold like to do a re-shoot of this image, printing out a cardboard version of the fairy, which the two young girls did,  which may help to make it appear more realistic and similar to the original Cottingley fairy images. I think it would also look better if the image was more contrasted looking similar to the original image.