Portrait - Ideas/ Studio/ Photographs/ Finals

Taking a slight brake from the research I have decided to write a little about some ideas I had for this project and how I initially started. At first I had no idea of the types of portrait photos I wanted to take and then when I began researching, seeing some of the work created by top photographers such as David Bailey and Terry Richardson, I had a little inspiration and a few ideas of my own and how I could take my own photographs. Once I had learnt lighting techniques I started playing around and moving the light or lights depending what shot I wanted to take. I liked the fact we were in our groups of 6 as this helped me a lot when I was unsure of things I would ask my peers and I would also watch them intently set up the studio to learn the process then when I knew the basics began help set up where I could. As I had never done studio before there was a lot to learn and take in to remember however I think I did quite well but definitely could improve. I learned early on that although I do like soft lights I like the harsh lights slightly more and so incorporated both in to my shots. So the lighting side was part of my ideas but overall to go with that I had thought of taking both serious shots and ones where the subject is smiling/ laughing etc. I had decided to use more different/ smiling ones as opposed to the serious ones as I noticed most of my class were picking those types of photographs for their finals and so I wanted to pick shots that were different were the subject was smiling etc. On the other hand when I looked at some of the more serious ones the photos chosen all fitted together and looked more like a body of work because all these were taking on the same shoot so the backgrounds all matched. Where – as if I chose photos that are different each in their own way the backgrounds won’t match and depending on how the subject looks (facial expressions) I don’t think they will all look as good together. However I am still undecided as I haven’t picked my finals yet. Plenty of decisions to be made.