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Experiment: Self-portrait

Using the desk light in my room. Surprisingly, it turned out nice. 

What did I do?

Even though the lighting was okay, the photo was still on the darker side. I increased the exposure to light up to photo and changed the white balance decrease the orange/red. 

The reason I like this photo is because it feels like I’m out of focus, but a few strands of my hair are in focus and part of the frame of my glasses seem in focus as well. Also, the glass of my glasses seems extra out of focus, which I think makes it a bit more interesting to look at.

Without my glasses, I can only see things that are close to me. I feel like this is in a way the same as people. Some people, you can only really see when you get closer to them.

I think I did the same for this one as the first one, since they are both very similar colour wise. The only difference is that on the first one my cheek has more light while this one is quite flat.

This photo might be my favourite from this post. My hair is not looking that neat and again, only my glasses are in focus. I like my face expression here: I look unimpressed. Funny enough, that is kind of how I feel about a lot of my own work and sometimes about myself. 

BEHIND THE SCENES

How does my desk lamp look like?

How did I take these photo’s?

A roll of toilet paper for stability

I did not use a timer to take the photo’s, now that I think about it it would have been much easier if I did. 

The struggle without much light:

Whenever this light lights up, it means that I don’t have enough light for the camera to focus on something. The red light does help, but sometimes it doesn’t.

#Experiment #portrait

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FINAL OUTCOME ASSIGNMENT 2: EXPERIMENTS

Link to HR in google drive: 

#final #outcome #assigment2 #experiments

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Assignment 2: Experiments

#assignment2 #experiments

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Assignment 1: Self-portrait

Who am I and what do I want to capture? 

#assignment1 #self-portrait

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FINAL OUTCOME ASSIGNMENT 1: SELF-PORTRAIT

Link to HR in google drive: 

#final #outcome #self-portrait #assignment1

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FINAL OUTCOME ASSIGNMENT 1: OTHER STUDENT

Link to HR in google drive: 

#final #outcome #assignment1

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Todd Selby

Photography Todd Selby was mentioned during a lecture about portraits. I don’t know many photographers, but the work of Todd Selby is very interesting. 

The first thing my attention was drawn to, is the logo. I really love how it’s drawn in colour, in a font that is not used a lot for logo’s. The colours work really well together. I think this website is aesthetically pleasing to me and I enjoy browsing this site. 

While scrolling down, there is one photo/project in particular that caught my attention:

The way drawn elements are used to create this brilliant. It’s funny, creative, not too serious. These drawn elements are also used in the video’s which I think makes the video so much more fun to watch.

I think Todd Selby is great at capturing what people do for a living or what they enjoy doing. His work has a playful feeling, friendly, honest, open and fun. 

The next project is also really interesting to look at:

He really dives into the workspace of the subject and manages to capture very odd but interesting looking textures and objects. 

#Todd Selby

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Assignment 1: Portrait of another student

The final outcome for the assignment will be in a separate blogpost!

Evana

1. Research, production & processes For the portrait of another student, I had a few ideas that I wanted to try. Because of unforeseen circumstances, my plans had to be cancelled and I had to meet up with my model another day. Because of these changes, I did not have access to what I needed for my portrait and so I had to figure it out without any tools. 

I set up another meeting with another model.

Research: 

A few times during lectures I received the following feedback: try it in black and white. Why? It isn’t hard to convert, but I never really thought of doing it. That’s when it hit me: I don’t know anything about black & white photography. I often come across portraits that are in black and white, I never understood why. Never have I thought of making photo’s with the main purpose of converting to black & white. I do love it though, but I just never thought of doing it myself. 

At home I have this book about black & white photography:

[BOOK]

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/the-best-black-and-white-photography-tips#what-is-black-and-white-photography

https://fstoppers.com/education/why-its-still-important-shoot-black-and-white-48141

2. Screen grabs

The photo is a bit dark, I tried to enhance the colours and lighten it up just a little. The sun was shining that day, but it’s not showing on Evana so I changed the white balance to give it some warmth. 

I like this photo because it’s not too serious, it is a bit playful. I would describe Evana the same, she is serious when she has to be, but otherwise she is a playful and fun person. 

How would it look like cropped?

Black and white?

3. Behind the scenes

There was no third person present, so I used my the timer on my iPhone to take the picture. As you can see, we were near the window so we could catch as much natural light as possible.

FINAL OUTCOME:

Evaluation

Josh

1. Research, production & processes

On the same day that I took photo’s of Evana, I met up with my “original” model. By the time he arrived in Portsmouth, the sun has already gone down and I was quite stressed about taking photo’s without proper light, because the previous time I tried, it didn’t work out. I was trying to think of locations where we could go, places with interesting lights. Because it was a Sunday, all places were closed. Originally, I had planned to go get a coffee so I could get to know him better and then maybe go to the beach (he mentioned he loves the beach). Instead, when we met up, we just started walking around town and whenever we spotted a source of light, we would try it. While walking, I got to get to know him better.

My impression of Josh 

After a few times of seeing him in class, I thought he was just a boy coming and going from class to class whenever necessary. He didn’t talk much, I didn’t talk much, so whenever he sat next to me there was no conversation. By the way he sat in class, I thought he was a bit mysterious. The only thing I heard coming from his side was his music, most of the time he had his headphones in. Somehow, someone started a conversation and since then I had a friend in class. I discovered, he is NOT mysterious at all and he is very talkative. By going on that walk, I think he really is a friendly and open person. He’s very easy to talk to as well, which made this assignment easier. 

About Josh:

Josh was born on December 25th and is from Brighton. He enjoys traveling, most of the time he is listening to music (drum and bass) and he will never refuse a beer. He is currently in his second year of Digital Media, but he has no idea what he’s doing (see quote). Not too long ago Josh went to Japan. In his time there, there was some sort of event or arcade hall where he could play Mario Kart, where he won 1st place. He’s convinced he can not be beaten. What is left on his bucketlist, is that he wants to go to a big drum&bass festival in the Netherlands/Belgium. His favourite holiday is Christmas.

Quotes

“I don’t think you can beat me at Mario Kart”  “I have no idea what I’m doing” About his study/course

Prior to going on that walk, I was planning on getting coffee to get to know him better and then to visit the beach. That all didn’t happen, so I had to think of what to do next. Sadly, we didn’t have much time. It was late, it was cold, everything was closed and Josh had to go home early too. Stress? Yes. 

2. Screen grabs

For this one I played with the levels, which made changed/enhanced colours.

The sign was bothering me so I decided to get rid of it. I copied a piece from the background to cover the sign and then to blend it in with the rest. 

After looking at the photo for a while, I thought maybe the red was a bit overwhelming. By playing with the colour balance, I got a whole different feeling. 

FINAL OUTCOME

Evaluation

#Student #portrait #assignment

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Digital photography & impact industry

Photography is often picked up as a hobby or students will experience working with a digital photo camera in school, which might trigger the hobby. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times before: students will take their hobby to the next level. 

There are a few reasons why photography could be a good thing for design students to pick up:

1. Colour: The colours on the display and on the screen may be different than in real life. Photography can help you understand light and colour better. Photography is about capturing for example emotion, a moment or even the world. Whatever you do, colours are never going to be the same depending on the light and environment. 

2. No more stock: When you are able to photograph things by yourself, you won’t be needing images from the internet anymore (unless they are out of your reach). I think this is great, because then you will have original photo’s of your own and you will not be spending too much time looking for something online. This way, you can avoid using the same photo every other company uses as well. Source

3. Composition: By learning photography you can develop a more delicate feeling for composition. Source

Source

In the last few years, Instagram has been used a lot for professional use. I have seen my peers do this as well. Instagram is a medium which allows you to upload photo’s and/or video’s, which makes it a great medium for photographers and videographers to upload their work on. This may be a reason why other want to get into photography or get better at it, so their page will look more aesthetically pleasing. 

Photography can be used for more than one platform, which gives us a lot of options and opportunities to create (by using print, digital etc). 

#Research #impact #industry

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Using Software

I came across this tutorial, which is shown when opening Adobe Photoshop. I watched the short clip and I thought it looked cool and I wanted to try it out. I used a photograph that I had open at the time, which I made for an assignment. 

Neon Effect

During this module, I learned how to work with Adobe Lightroom Classic. This program was quite new to me, but I learned that it was very easy to use and I enjoy editing with it. Photoshop is still my first pick, but that might change in time. 

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Experiment: Portrait (another student)

This experiment can be used for my own portrait or portrait of another student.

For this experiment, I wanted to combine a photograph with text to create a “persona”. Since it was late at night, I decided to use a photograph of me (made by Clara). Because it is an experiment, I wanted to try and see how the text would look like and also experiment with different colours and fonts as well.

Attempt 1:  

Attempt 2:

Attempt 3: I decided to try another photograph, made by Evana during a workshop. This photograph does not have as much colour as the previous edited photo’s. I wanted to try out more fonts just to see how I can put in the words in a playful way. I also tried other words, which would make more sense in case I want to use it on a website. 

#Experiment #Portrait

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Recreating photograph

Please click on the header/title to enlarge this blogpost to see photo’s and screengrabs more clearly

Johnny Depp by Jean Baptiste Mondino

For this assignment, we had to recreate a photograph which we swapped during class last week. I got a photograph of Johnny Depp by Jean Baptiste Mondino. I never heard of the photographer before, but after looking him up I think his work is really nice. Some of his photographs are well known, some I recognized from popular campaigns (j’adore in joy, sauvage Dior)

I tried to plan how to recreate the photograph: by using a light and a dark/black background. It also might have been a good idea to use some sort of reflector, since the photograph doesn’t have that many shadows. As discussed with Claire, I decided to focus on getting the pose of the model right, the light and the black. 

On 2 December, before I met with my model, I asked if she had a shiny jacket to wear and if she could put her hair up and back. Since she has white/silvery, shoulder length hair, it would be a bit difficult to recreate the hairstyle. I think she managed to make herself look great. 

For this assignment I decided to use my FE 1.8/50 lens for a shallow depth of field. I had the Aputure AL-MX for a short period of time, on the photo above I mounted it on top of my camera. 

As you can see, my model has a shiny jacket on, small hoop earrings, cross necklace and her hair up. She managed to pose quite similar to the photograph.

I made this photograph using a plain background, hoping I could photoshop the black background. This was harder than I thought because of her lighter hair. 

For this one I used the Aputure AL-MX. My model is quite tall and I’m small, so I tried to compensate by standing on a chair to get the light right. 

We walked around outside because I wanted to try and find a black wall or door  to use as the background. Also, it was pretty sunny so I was hoping we could try out shots using natural light instead of the AL-MX. I think this photo turned out good, the background is just not as black. 

END RESULT:

I wouldn’t say that it was easy to do, I feel like I need to work on the hair more to make it really blend in. I would like to try to recreate the photo in an actual studio. 

We managed to find a few locations with black doors. There was one door we tried, but the sun was too bright, resulting in overexposed photo’s that could not be saved.

But somehow I ended up with this one which is my favourite:

I edited it to black and white and played a bit with the black and shadows.

Sadly, because the short amount of time that I had on this day, I didn’t think of making behind-the-scenes photo’s. 

5/12/19

After receiving feedback from Claire, I decided to work on my photograph a bit more because it wasn’t quite there yet. 

Claire showed me how to edit the photograph in Apple photo’s, I wanted to try it out in Lightroom. One of the first things that I did was lower the shadows. What this did for my photograph was that my model didn’t appear to be “glowing” anymore. By lowering the shadows, the model merged together with the black background and it looks less photoshopped this way. 

Another thing that was bothering me is the hair. The background was photoshopped to make it black, but at the cost of the hair. Or so I thought. I talked to Clara about this when I showed her the end result, but she happened to have the solution to my problem. 

Clara showed me how I can use the brush to mask off an area of the hair to then increase the texture. The hairs look more defined and it will look less photoshopped as well. I did this for all the parts that I thought needed more texture. 

I also made other masks to lighten up some areas of the hair and jacket by increasing the exposure a little bit.

A close up to show what I did:

The before feedback photo and the after:

THE END RESULT:

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Experiment: Self-portrait

At this point I still haven’t done a lot of self-portrait experiments.

I don’t like photo’s of myself, I started to think about how I could show a bit of myself in the photograph without making myself too uncomfortable for the shot to be ugly. Looking around in my room, what could I use? Many of my sentimental items are at home. My eyes landed on my bed, a safe, comfortable place. 

It started out looking something like this:

This is actually a drawing I made months ago, but it shows what I was trying to do.

Then another thought: can I make it look “different��? Yes, I can. 

I wanted to create a photo that somehow feels like suffocation, being in a small place, restricted. For this, I put the duvet cover all over me and used the flashlight.

Because of my duvet cover, it didn’t give me the feeling that I was going for. I tried again by covering myself with a piece of clothing in black. 

I think the light was too harsh, too bright. At this point I wasn’t thinking of diffusing it. I noticed that with every slight change of position, if the light was not on my face, I couldn’t focus the camera. 

After this I started to see dots and weird shapes because of the flashlight, I decided to take a break from using the flashlight

I wanted to try something out. I wanted to use natural lighting as much as possible, but I wanted to try something else so the photo’s wouldn’t be boring for me to look at. 

It was getting dark pretty fast, I needed a light. The next photo was taken using the flashlight covered by a tissue. I also used fairy lights, these lights are yellow/orange and the flashlight is white. 

Behind the scenes

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15 November 2019 Workshop: Portraits

Photographing strangers

Manager at the Guildhall Village

Chef at Cafe Coco

Very friendly, we chatted a bit about the assignment. When I took the photo’s and asked if he wanted to see them, he almost ran away from me saying “I don’t like photo’s”. 

Some technical changes for next time: I used a high ISO which caused the grains in the photo’s. I feel like the grain is kind of ruining the photo’s, but I was in a hurry and I thought that the message is more important than the technical stuff. This is something I would like to improve for next time. 

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5 October 2019 Experiment: Portrait

Evana approached me to ask if I could take photo’s of her, so she can update her social media. We went outside without a plan and I just started taking photo’s.

The feedback I received for this photo is that I probably could have cropped off the hands.

I like the way I edited this photo. I made it a bit warmer and I think it makes it look like a warm/sunny day. 

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31 October 2019 Experiment: Lighting kit

After the lighting workshop Clara and I decided that we should get a lighting kit and try it out in the reading week. We met in Eldon building and got a lighting kit + battery and a tripod. We were hoping we could use the studio, so when we had everything we had to think of another location to try it out. It was raining that day and because of the warnings we decided not to shoot outside. We went to Clara’s place instead.

On the picture below you can see we have 2 lights set up. 

Immediately after we took some photo’s with the light meter, I got frustrated because I couldn’t see anything on the screen because it was black. This could be one of the reasons why I wouldn’t do this again.

Clara wanted a photo together, even though the lights weren’t in a good position.

Tuned down the yellow and made the photo lighter. I’m not sure if I like the edit on this one.

On the photo below we only used one light to try out. In the end I liked the soft light that’s lighting up Clara’s face from the right.

Edit attempt to make it a bit more “dramatic”.

This photo was taken by Clara

The photo had a bit too much yellow for my liking, so I changed that and added color to the highlights and shadows. I also cropped the photo so the blue sticker wouldn’t be visible and my hands. 

Outcome: 

On my camera screen this photo of Clara looked really good, but on a computer screen it’s darker.

I played with the white balance: 

Because of the blood I tried to make it more dramatic, as if she was in a horror movie. I enhanced the blue in the photo and made the black and shadows more intense. Outcome:

Evaluation

During and after this experiment I felt that I prefer natural lighting over using a lighting kit. I do believe that the lighting kit is great to use when there’s not much natural light available or when someone or something just needs more light to create a more dramatic photo, or to highlight. Because of the lack of experience with lighting, I should experiment with it more to figure out what I do like and how I can use it in the future. The photo’s did turn out great (in my opinion) and I enjoyed editing them. 

Click here for Clara’s blogpost about this experience