THE TASK

For our third assignment, the task was to take four portrait photographs, focusing on experimenting with lighting, composition, form and the pose of the subjects.  The images didn’t have to be linked, and we could interpret the brief in any way we wanted.

I struggled for quite a while to come up with an idea, as the brief was quite broad.  Although this was a good thing (because it gave us freedom to explore our creativity), I had no idea where to start. Eventually, I began thinking about emotions and how people portray their emotions within photographs.  I thought about “selfie culture” and how, currently, a lot of photos involve the subject having a straight face or lacking emotion.  I wanted to try and challenge this by attempting to capture genuine emotion and happiness within a photograph.

THE FINAL IMAGES

After deciding on the theme for my four images, I began thinking about how I wanted to go about achieving my goal.  I wanted to try and capture genuine emotion from my subjects, without it being forced or staged.  I think it’s so easy for photos to look staged (as obviously a lot of the time they are), but sometimes the emotion looks forced and therefore it kind of ruins the credibility of those emotions.  This was what I wanted to avoid.

I asked four of my friends to be the models for my images, and we all went out together one evening.  I searched for a little while to find a spot that I liked, that also had reasonable lighting.  It was very dark outside and ideally I didn’t want to use the flash on my camera, so I knew how important good lighting would be to increase the quality of my images.  Eventually I found a place that I liked, but I decided that I still wanted a bit of extra light, so I turned on the torch on my phone and got one of my friends to hold it (whilst one of the others was being photographed).  I then set the remaining two people a mission to make the subject laugh – something they were both more than willing to help out with.

I was a bit concerned about how well this would go – as I was very aware that my images could still look forced as a result of the subject knowing my goal was for them to laugh.  However, this turned out to not be a problem, as because there were five of us in total, we all ended up joking around with each other anyway and we were all non-stop laughing (even myself) for a lot of the photoshoot.  I managed to get my four images, and I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

I then decided to format my four images in the style of a triptych to showcase all of them next to each other (see below).  I tried to arrange them within the triptych so that the two zoomed images were in the centre, and the slightly more zoomed out ones were framing each side.

There are some things that I could have done better, such as improving the clarity of a couple of the images, but given the fact that this was my first proper nighttime shoot, I’m extremely happy with the results.  I also love how genuine their laughter is (it really was genuine!) and how they all seem to have a light in their eye (I assume from the torch on my phone).  I feel like I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve – capturing natural laughter within my photographs.

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