Final Portraits

The portraits I have chosen for my final three portraits are as follows:

13th April  2016

For the stranger portrait, I took this image which was quite a challenge as taking a picture of a stranger is something that comes with a challenge. I managed to find someone ad take this image which I am really happy with as it isn’t just a straight on the image of a face it has shadow and depth. I don’t really like boring images of a face straight n it doesn’t really excite me very much whereas images where the subject is facing away from the camera and more artistic seem to capture more of the person. the colours in this image are very muted and work really well in this context with this image and how it looks with the bricks in the background and how industrial it looks.

 

Self Portrait reshot

 

For the second Portrait, it was my self-portrait.

Self portrait- Take Two

 

The third image is my familiar portrait and it is of Alice.

Portraits - Studio

Now I had a hard deciding which portrait to choose for this on as I had a few to choose from but I think this one is probably one of the best that I have taken for this brief. I liked the Rembrandt lighting, which really adds depth to the image and how the lighting looked with the snoot modifier and the strobe light. what I enjoyed about this image was that the isolation with the black background making it low key and something I really enjoy. It has a feeling of Penn’s work and that is also something I really enjoy about this piece of work.

Self portrait- Take Two

I decided to re-shoot my portraits for the self-portrait portion of the brief, this was because I wasn’t entirely happy with what I had created for the portraits, they seemed flat and lacklustre which led me to become very critical of my work in general. I didn’t know where to go or what to do, I felt like I needed to leave it for a couple of weeks until I had recharged myself. This led to me thinking about colour and shadows, I have recently purchased an LED bulb that is colour changing, because of the nature of cheap products they aren’t the best for colour reproduction, making some of the colours have multiple tints of colours which work really well for this type of photography that I wanted to try with this brief, I wanted to step away from the plain old portraits that I have created for the friend portrait.

Self Portrait reshot

The coloured light I decided on was a ‘white’ light setting which turns out to be just mix of red, green, and blue, giving a mixture of colours that can be manipulated to get results such as pictured above, now this was something I enjoyed creating as if you move the light ever so slightly you can get a different look from it.

I decided that to get the most dramatic image possible I would go into the corridor in my flat and turn the lights out and try and almost rake the light across my face to give this low-key look without being in a studio. The light just catches my eye which makes it shine a bit more.

Processing this image all I did was up the clarity and dropped the saturation and made the dark bits smoother as there was a slight grain on them parts after it was saved.

considerations for the portrait

2V2A9884_e_4 2V2A9884_e_2-4 IMG_9200-2 IMG_9199-1

 

For my familiar portrait I wanted to have one of the portraits I took in the studio to be the final piece. I have started to like low key portraiture a lot more in recent shoots, so it only made sense to use one of these images at the top of Alice, but then I was struck with the option of black and white or colour. I used to religiously use black and white, but in recent weeks I have started to use colour in my work a lot more and it is very freeing and has helped develop my skills as a photographer and media practitioner. I feel like I am going to use the image of Alice in colour as I feel that this image is stronger. I also really like the images of Callum as they are very striking and visually appealing the way I have I have used light to just capture the face and eye, this create visual interest.

The image I have decided to go with is the black and white image of Alice as I feel like this is very complimentary to my style of photography that I am used to.