On friday we got to experiment in the photography studio with lighting, props and cameras. I took this time to try and find the right lighting to maybe get a really good shot for my final portrait piece; this meant adjusting with various lights to different angles for interesting shots. (My favourite was the snoot, because the light was easy to angle and it was called a ‘snoot’). After a certain amount of time Mike let us mess around with the gels for the lights, this was great as Emily and I took turns in shooting in blue and red light as they were contrasting shades.

Here is a slightly underexposed photo of Emily which I think really suits my brief and I think it’s a really interesting shot. The flower looks slightly out of focus and maybe I could draw more light onto Emily’s face, but overall I quite like the photo.

These are some examples of the photos we took with red and blue lighting with the gels. As you can see the photo of Emily is very dark and the photo of me is very bright which outlines Emily’s skills and my skills with photography and how we depict each photo visually. My take was deliberately darker with a higher aperture because I wanted a more mysterious feel to my photos whereas Emily wanted a lighter, happier photo of me (which didn’t really happen because I wasn’t smiling when this photo was taken, which is what Emily wanted, but I liked the light contrast in this photo). It also shows that my weakness lies in shooting in portrait as Emily’s photo has my full torso in it, whereas my photo contains a big gap above Emily’s head which is all background.

With this task I found it difficult to shoot with darker backgrounds; the photos looked great, just the lighting was tricky to get right for each shot.

From Mike’s critique’s last week I tried to shoot more in portrait to get myself out of my comfort zone. I quite like these photos as they show I can use lighting to my advantage and my portraits are getting better.

My favourite photo of the shoot was this one taken by Melissa, it doesn’t quite work for the brief for the portraits, but nevertheless, I really like the lighting gradient and Daniel’s expression.

Overall, I found the workshop really helpful and I think I may used one of my studio portraits in my final brief.