Continued: Week 2 portraits

The hunt for light

 These two images are my mum's and my nan's hands and a light from the floor is shiningdirectly below. Because of the blur it kind of reminds me of those old movies where an alien is approaching and they add blur around the outline of the creature, which gives that unsettling feeling that you don't know what is infront of you.

My Nan came trundling up the path to my house yestarday, and as usual she was carrying a ton of shopping in each of the 4 bags she had with her. My mum had just brought this whopper of an Umbrella and the shopping, my nan, and the umbrella gave me this idea to take some pictures under the street lights. We headed out around 9:30 and it took us a little over 30 minutes to take all of the pics. It took a little while to look for the right spot with good light, but eventually we settled down the road from my house in my local GP car park.Even though my nan was a bit annoyed (I think you can tell in a few of the photos) that she had to stand out side for so long and some of the shots are a little too dark or out of focus, it works for the majority of them and adds a softness to some of them.

Week 2 portraits

 

Out the two...

I'm unsure which photo looks better.

They are all abit too dark. I have a bit of trouble getting lighting right when I take photos.

I can't choose which shots out of this selection look best. Some are blurred, some aren't but I like them all. I really wanted to find a lone street light, that was shining brightly while my nan stands underneath it,  looking like a lone traveller with only the bright lights watching over her journey, and guiding her home. It reflects on alot of who she is- quite stubborn, stands alone, strong. This makes me worry sometimes, because she is alone so much that no-one would watch over her if anything was to happen. 

Sketchbook examples

A few of these are digital versions of sketchbooks, but I still think they look rather interesting and could be done in a similar way using traditional media.

Dust

This idea was extremely difficult to get right. I had to juggle my lamp in one hand and the talcum powder in the other. It took me over an hour before I called it a day, and stop trying to shoot it exactly as I pictured. I think I had the sandman in mind for this shot. It is supposed to be as if i'm the keeper of dreams, the ruler of my subconcious world in this shot. The talc pwder didn't work too well mixed with the glitter, I think the glitter was weighed down by the powder, so it refused to move an inch, or I wasn't blowing hard enough, but I didn't want it to look like a dust cloud but more like a stream of dust.

Altered the image levels alittle on one of my computer programs that came withthe camera. Highlighted the hand and the surrounding area, by changing the contrast. The dust blowing away is the most important.

Tears

I'm not too sure what the idea behind this particular shot was. I think this was the last set of shots I took on the Sunday gone and I needed to hurry because my battery was almost gone. I had the idea of doing something with war paint and tears, but I didn't have a wide collection of face paints left so I just did white tears- probably because I found my collection of Hans Christan Andersen short stories over the summer, and The Snow Queen popped into my head. I only took two pictures before my camera decided it had enough and died on me.

Scatter

I think I gave up too quickly on this idea. This one I took yesterday night again in my bathroom with a sheet of black paper behind me and my desk lamp to one side. The idea was that I would chuck the glass chess pieces up in front of me, and I would watch them fall. I picked certain pieces out, of course the king, queen, knight, bishop and a couple of pawns and threw them up in front of me because it was supposed to be as if my "kingdom" was falling apart around me, everthing was in disarray and all I could do was stop and stare.
The photo didn't turn out to too well, because the focus was not quite right and the shutter speed wasn't fast enough to capture a better outline of the chess figures. If I was to redo it, I probably would hhave zoomed out abit more, to capture more onf the pieces in the shot and framed and focused it better.