Experimenting for the portraits project

November 11, 2019

Experimenting for the portraits project

Experimental portraits
6.11-8.11.2019

I took many photos during the study week when I was at home. First I took a few try out pictures of myself to figure out my set up and my flashlight. I also tried a couple of different ways to hide my face, like Vivianne Sassen does in many of her pictures, but I didn´t take that very far. I don´t think these photos I took were very successful. I think if I do want to cover the face for my final piece, I´ll have to come up with a really good way of doing that. It hasn´t come to me yet so I let that aspect go.

1/60 F1.8 ISO 1600

I wanted to experiment a bit with colour in my photos. On a wider scale I just wanted to try to take interesting yet minimal portraits. I was planning on using my small flashlight and putting different coloured papers on it to get different coloured light, but luckily my dad had bought a light with different colour settings, so I didn't have to do that.
For my first set of photos I used my dad as my model. I used a low shutter speed to create "extra outlines", or to show movement. This meant that I had to set my ISO and aperture as low as possible to make up for all the brightness. The room we were in was also very dark, the only light we had on was the coloured light. On some of the photos we set the light to be a strobe light, so it flashed in different colours. With the long shutter speed this meant that the picture captured a couple of different colours which I thought was a really interesting effect. For example the picture below has pink and blue lines in it and some of the light looks purple.

1" (second) F1.8 ISO 100

I think the photo above was quite successful. I like

the way his face is quite clear but it´s also all around his head. I also

like the colours.

2"5 F1.8 ISO100

I like the blurriness and the way his hands look 4" F1.8 ISO100

4" F1.8 ISO100

1"6 F1.8 ISO100

1/8 F1.8 ISO200
I really love this photo of my dad. I think
the lighting is good and I managed to get a really
nice depth of field so that only the area around
his eyes are focused.

I also took some pictures my mum. I used books as props for some of them and again used the coloured light.