Three Portraits of Another Student
This page is about the three portraits of another student part of the brief.
The images shown on this page have been scaled down and quality reduced in order to reduce download times. Click on an image to see a larger version
Proposal
I intend to take portraits of Tom Walters in differing styles.
I will take the photographs in various different places around hull and use different viewpoints to achieve different styles.
Research
I will take the photographs using my own Sony Cybershot DSC-F828 8.0 megapixel digital camera.
Web sites I found useful:
- Kodak Portrait Photography - Good web site with information on lighting, composition and other portrait issues.
- Portrait Photography - Interesting web site with a definition of a portrait and some useful tips.
- People and Portrait Photography - Web site with some interesting articles on portrait photography.
Planning
The photographs will be optimised, be a maximum of 500 x 500 pixels and will be presented on this web site.
I took several different photographs; I then chose the best six which I have displayed below. I have commented on each, and will pick the best three to choose as my final images.
Image 1
- Surroundings not that nice.
- Good viewpoint, slightly lower level than subject.
Image 2
- Eyes closed as subject looking into sun.
- My shadow is visible in the picture.
- Long distance from subject.
Image 3
- Lot's of different shapes.
- Perhaps the complexity of the background distracts the viewer from the subject.
- Man walking by in picture, but could probably be edited out.
Image 4
- Almost symmetrical.
- Path leads viewers eye towards the subject.
- Long distance from subject.
Image 5
- Good distance from subject.
- Background doesn't distract from subject.
- Man working in background, but could probably be edited out.
Image 6
- Different to my other chosen photographs.
- Subject within background, i.e. in front of shop, but behind the glass.
- Other people in the photograph could distract from the subject.
After reviewing the above images I decided to reject Image 2 because the subject's eyes were closed and my shadow was in the picture.
Image 4 and 5 are very similar, but from different distances. In Image 5, the subject fills more of the image and the background doesn't distract from the subject as much, therefore I decided to reject Image 4.
As I could only choose three photographs, I had to decide against another image; I chose to decide against Image 1 because of the poor surroundings.
Final Piece
Final Image 1
I cropped the image to get rid of some of the background to try to reduce distraction from the subject.
I would have preferred to get rid of the man in the background of the picture, but it would have been very difficult.
Final Image 2
This is a good portrait photograph with good composition. I cropped the image to get rid of the man working in the background.
Final Image 3
I didn't crop this image as I felt that the whole background was necessary in order to produce the effect that I wanted.
However, I adjusted the levels to make the overall picture lighter.
Review
Everything went to plan whilst I was doing this part of the brief.
The photographs were chosen from those I have taken of the subject in the past weeks. They could have possibly been better if I planned them more before I set out to take them so I could capture exactly what I wanted.
I had trouble with optimising the images for these portraits as they were taken at a very high resolution with quality set to fine. I had to reduce the quality more than the self portrait images, in order to achieve reasonable download times.
