Self Portrait Photograpghy project: An Experiment with Selfies
5.10.14
portraits for days
Recently we have been set the project of exploring the diverse world of portrait photography. When we were first set this project, I was a little bit more than perplexed. I have had very little experience with full on proper photography, and some of the concepts and photographers presented to us were completely new and baffling and sometimes just weird. HOWEVER, spurred on by an approaching deadline, I got to work.
I started off by searching for props (i.e. anything in my room), and trying to put it/them somewhere where it would be out of place to give the shot some surreal tones. To be honest, these efforts were kind of terrible. For example, for some strange reason I have a big bag of ball pit balls in my room. So naturally I tried to utilise these. Unfortunately it was quite late and by this point ideas were very very basic, as you can probably tell:
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yeah...
What I was attempting to do was put my head in the bag to give the impression that my head has been somehow magically been replaced by a plethora of colourful ball pit balls. A nice idea that was poorly executed. (don't worry, we revisit this one later).Frankly embarrassed with myself and determined never to make anything this shockingly terrible again I removed the balls from in and around my head and attempted to utilise them in a new way (not an innuendo, seriously dude).
I started off by cutting an assortment of coloured balls in half. I then turned the lights off and set my camera to full manual. I cranked the aperture as low as it could go (f/4.5 on my 18-55 lens), lowered the ISO to it's lowest setting to reduce digital noise, the shutter speed to about 8 seconds and the flash firing to 2nd curtain. 2nd curtain flash firing on a Canon DSLR basically means the flash fires as the shutter goes up, and flashes once more as the shutter closes, allowing for cool light trails whilst keeping motion blur down to a minimum. The dissected coloured balls were placed over the flash, making a red filter. I got these results which were interesting, but a little too simplistic for my tastes:
The second photo of this set is probably my favourite. The improvised red filter combined with the flash creates a vignette around the subject. It is also a pretty intense shade of red, which could have connotations of anger, intimacy or pain. But as aforementioned, I found the content of these shots pretty bare (I pretty much danced in front of the camera for 10 minutes) and so I continued my adventure into the deepest facets of my brain box in search of a photo I was satisfied with.
In this set I used my desk lamp as my only light source. I found this to be quite an effective spotlight and when used efficiently created some quite dramatic shots. I found using this one lamp was the turning point in my creative process. It was from here I started to develop a vision of what and how I wanted to take a photo of. I drew a ghost on an A3 piece of card which seemed to be pretty effective.
The above photo is the one that sparked my brainbox. The simple act of holding a cartoony, ghostly mask in front of the face seemed to be making a statement on creating a front that concealed the true emotions of the individual from everyone around them, giving them the impression that everything is A-OK.
After shooting inside in my room until gone 2am I decided to go to bed and carry on in the next few days. I knew from this point I wanted to shoot outside in the dark using the path lights on the Student Village at my university. It would have been rather difficult to shoot this on my own and so I enlisted the help of two of my friends who took it in turns holding the ghost to their face. This meant I would have to do my fair share of directing. I wanted to shoot these photos so that A: you could actually see the subject, and B: the models didn't move or wobble around too much since I was using a longer shutter speed and second curtain flash firing wouldn't have fit into the mise en scene of the portrait.
These are my four favourite outdoor shots.
I am intrigued to see how I will begin to edit these images. As I am typing this I have no idea what I want to do to these images but with a little bit of experimentation and dabbling I'm sure I will come up with something.
THANKS FOR READING AND SORRY FOR THE 'NORMOUS POST <3
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