Hair Salon

I decided to challenge myself by asking to take some photos at the local hair salon. I had planned initially to use this for one of the projects but decided to just go and take the best set of photos I could to capture the feeling of the salon.  I like it because the area is bright and fresh feeling, and the chairs and decor is clean and modern. I had some ideas about what I would shoot (I was not going to include customers as the owner didn't want that), mostly thinking about what the features of the salon were, and perhaps what would be required if I was asked to capture the feeling of the space for a client for example.

I went before work one morning, and had about half an hour to photograph, which was ample time as I was only using one camera and lens, my normal 24-70mm f2.8 which covers most situations, and was not going to use any artificial lighting. I started by taking some photos of product with the salon out of focus in the background, but felt these didn't work that well - perhaps I should have decreased my aperture? I forgot how much less light there is in artificially lit buildings than outside! Most of my work lately has been outside with only the odd shoot inside. Anyway, I set my ISO to 400 and used relatively large apertures which worked well with some images more so than others. I like using a smallish depth of field to focus on areas of interest and I quite like the blurring effect that this gives.

I tried getting down low and found this to be quite effective in changing how things looked. I also shot along the chairs which worked well, and tried shooting almost straight down on the scene, though I'm not very tall this also changed how things looked. I liked the idea of shooting into the mirrors reflecting other mirrors creating the 'endless' kind of view. An interesting idea photographically which I have used before (for example in Assignment 1: Photo 4).

I also photographed the owner as he spoke on the phone at the front desk - he is quite blurred in the background, and the bright lights behind him are blown out but the focus is still on the chairs in front. I also needed a couple of overview shots - I thought it was important to get the name of the salon included in a photo, and also have a more zoomed out view of the whole area.

The shoot itself went well - I didn't take too long and didn't get in the way of the owner and workers setting up, which was important to me as it was a favour of sorts (which might have been hard to refuse given I am a client!). I managed to get a good variety of photographs which I am pleased with. I remembered to shoot key photos both horizontally and vertically to give me good choice in the post-processing to see what works best.

Post-processing was somewhat of a challenge. I shot all the photos with sunlight white balance, thinking that I could easily correct in post. However my skills are not great with correcting white balance - a couple of shots were great but others were harder to correct. This is an area I need to improve on, and I suspect my next course will be the Digital photography 1 course so I can force myself to learn some more skills.

Anyway, here are the photos, I am pleased to have a set of 5 photos to show for my efforts and will be providing these to the owner for use under Creative Commons licensing.