Brief –

‘This project requires you to respond to the notion of home.

As many of you have relocated from what you will have considered your home in the last twelve months you find yourselves in an excellent position to reflect upon this task. Relocation, disruption, comfort and safety – memory, place and time, the idea of home is central to our existence, culturally.

Self Portrait

I chose this portrait of myself as it shows expression and personality. From looking at McCurry’s work, his photographs showed essence of each person he photographed. In this image you can see my expression of confusion struck across my face, the shallow depth of field and I have edited the levels and exposure to try and relate McCurry’s style and technique. I liked this image as it shows me as a person, it has a lot more depth to it then just an image of myself. its quite a crisp and detailed image, how you can see just the littlest creases on my face and the reflection of light in my eyes. Even though it isn’t the most flattering image of myself I do like it.

Portrait of someone I know

This is a portrait of my friend JJ. I positioned him against the blue background as I felt it worked well with what he was already wearing. McCurry’s photos always communicated powerfully through colour and depth of field. I got my subject to look into the camera, making it much more engaging as I wanted to imitate his work. Although i like the colour connection in this photograph, the focus isn’t as crisp as i wanted it to be. I could improve by focusing a lot more on his eyes making him connect more with the camera so the audience can engage with him as a person. i fell like this shot looks more like a fashion shoot than anything rather than a in depth portrait. Another problem i spotted also is that I haven’t got his full body in shot, I have accidentally cropped half his shoulder out the frame which Is a amateur mistake of mine. Although i have taken it as a learning reflection as I will focus more on the framing when taking my next portraits.

Portrait of a stranger

I took a few photos of strangers but I liked this one the most out of them all. I got him to just naturally pose whilst I took his photograph. Unfortunately the lighting that day was a lil dull making the image quite grey but I managed to enhance the colour in his skin. From this photograph it gives you an idea of his personality, his faint smile and warming eyes express that he is a kind and calming man.  I admire in portraiture that you can see within a person just from looking at their eyes. The facial expression they convey can proclaim a lot deeper meaning. I feel from just looking at this photograph you can get a glimpse of what type of man he is and that is what I wanted to communicate to my audience through my portraits.

Steve McCurry

I found McCurry from researching famous portrait photographers and really fell for his engaging and beautiful photography. The way he expresses a person and catches the colours and depth of a person I found very endearing.  He travels around the world taking images of strangers from all different cultures, conflicts, ancient traditions and ethic backgrounds, capturing them in  such detail that each image has a story to tell. I find that the eyes are the most engaging in his photographs, you can really look deep into the person and see much further past that. The use of shallow depth of field has brought his subject into focus, pulling their eyes straight and displaying prominent facial expressions. I find his work very inspiring and I’d like to reflect his style into my photographs for the Portraiture brief.

Here are few of my favourite portraits which I find inspiring and captivating;

http://stevemccurry.com/

For this weeks workshop we were given the task to go out with cameras and different lenses to take portraiture images, experimenting with the frame structure and lighting texture.  The locations for the images I found when walking round Lincoln in my spare time.  I remember appreciating the tone of light and thought it would be a good place to capture some really inspiring and affective images.  It gave me the opportunity to experiment with depth of field, focusing on the individual and framing options. These are the top few which I found appealing to the eye from todays shoot. The lighting in each photograph, especially the stairwell shots, really are dramatically engaging. I wanted to get an eye for different lighting and working with the camera, to successful create an affective photograph.