Portraits

After the week 6 portraiture workshop, we were tasked to be a little more ambitious with the portraits we take. By that I mean, venturing off of the university campus and asking a complete stranger if they would be willing to participate in a photoshoot. This proved quite difficult, especially considering Lincoln is a city where everyone is constantly on the move, and too busy to take 5 minutes out for a portrait. However, I did manage to find a stranger who was willing to participate with my work. I met him through a third year friend, who is living in a 5 bedroom house share with him. The reason I asked him rather than the other people who lived there was mainly down to his appearance. He has many qualities that society would label as feminine however, such as his long hair and slender physique, but this all juxtaposes with his dark black facial hair. By taking inspiration from photographer Richard Avedon, I wanted to try and glorify his hair in a way that it is the key element of the photo, and the way I achieved this was by taking photos of his hair in motion, very similar to some photos by Richard Avedon and the way I achieved this was by lowering the increasing the shutter speed to a 100th of a second (1/100). This eliminated most motion blur in the photos and achieve relatively crisp results. However, when you increase the shutter speed, it decreases the amount of time the lens is given to take in surrounding light, making the shots very dark. the counteract this, I used the flash on the camera, as it acts as a quick burst of lighting that illuminates the entire subject.

These are all of the photos that achieved good results:

Final Photo:

I chose this as my final photo because it is the perfect embodiment of what I was trying to create. The attention is draw to the hair, as it is in motion and is mostly crisp. I am a little disappointed that there is still some motion blur on the hair, and perhaps this could be avoided in the future by using more lighting and a quicker shutter speed. We can also see the juxtaposition of his masculine and feminine qualities. Finally, the way his hair flows behind him, it almost looks like a lions mane, the significance of this links back to what we perceive as masculine and feminine, and where long hair will typically be represented as a feminine quality, here it looks like the hair of a very masculine animal. Another reason I chose this photo as my final image is because the design on his shirt isn’t fully visible, I didn’t want the pop culture significance of the Game of Thrones design to take away from my intentional meaning. Also important to note, I took this photo into Photoshop and just bumped up the saturation of the colours, as they were lost to the flash from the camera that gave them this very dull and flat look.