The Pastiche; Part A

Task: Imitate the photographic language of an image by researching and reproducing compositional form, camera setting, lighting, conditions, depth of field and scale.


I chose to imitate the image by Jem Southam, 'Seaford Head', 1999.

I wanted to imitate this image as I knew a lot of areas which have cliffs. I felt if I knew the area and where to go I would be better prepared and could spend more time trying to create my image, rather than trying to find a location.


I loved the different textures and tones to this image and was interested in trying to recreate these features especially, as I feel these elements give the photo character.
I chose to shoot my image in black and white as I felt I could experiment with the tones more when printing. Also, as I am still learning which aperture etc to use, I felt more confident testing with black and white than colour.


To create this image I went to Dunford, Ramsgate. I walked to the end of the beach to as near to the cliffs as I could get before setting up the tripod.
I made these shots using a medium format camera mainly using a shutter-speed of 1/500 and an f.stop mainly between f8 and f16.


My Negs: For this I used a black and white film with an ISO of 400.