Portrait Inspiration

I adore this portrait of Evelyn Nesbit by Gertrude Kasebier. Like I said, I've been doing a lot of portraiture research and one of the people I came across and fell in love with was her. I recently visited UCF, the first FL college campus I had ever visited btw, and I spent a good deal of time in the library looking at portraiture books (lol I know I'm such a photo nerd...) But while I looked I found myself engrossed in one particular book called Karsh: The Art of the Portrait. pretty straightforward, but it was pretty much the answer to every question I had about portraiture (aside from the answers Frank gave me) and I wrote down a couple of other photographers mentioned that I liked, including Gertrude.

Anyways, this portrait is pretty much the epitome of what I want from my portraits. The woman is relaxed and not playing for the camera. She is letting down her public mask. She seems tired, but it is known that she is tired by her expression. You can tell she is comfortable because of her slouching position, but it is also inviting, as if she is used to using her body to invite others in. She is young, but seems experience. So much you can tell from this portrait, that is what I want from mine. Hopefully I can find a way to get this out of my models. For now, I'll just keep researching until I can get back into the studio.

Portraiture

So, on the note of going in a different direction from the dancing photographs, I think I'm going to solely focus on portraiture the rest of the semester. I really want to get a better grip on lighting since it seems that my biggest weaknesses in my photos are shadows and emphasis. I'm still getting the hang of paying attention to every part of the photograph when I'm constructing it, but I'm getting there. These are some portraits I made of my friend Hadley, I was focusing on using a harder spotlight to create a dramatic feel. The last two photos are a much softer light; I'll be working with her again using the softer light again, but probably not in the studio. I'll also be taking photos of her best friend, Humza, (who I photographed for the eye project) in the studio. Aside from that I plan on taking candid photos of Humza in our Academic Commons and probably of Hadley as well since many times she is with him. I have many ideas about how I want to approach both of these angles of portraiture and I've been really researching the idea of portraiture, especially the work of Yousuf Karsh, who Frank told me about; so lets see how they work out and how much I can actually get done with the remainder of the semester seemingly flying by.

Dance

This semester I started out with an elaborate plan to photograph dancers. I got the idea after taking some black and white silhouette photographs of my friend Hadley in dance-like poses for our painting class. I fully researched it, looking at different dance photographers, different lighting techniques, and poured over many, many dance photos. I found this photographer, Ed Flores, who does dance photography EXACTLY how I wanted to capture it, it was just a matter of getting people, places, and clothing... So, I had some of my dancer friends lined up, first was one of my suite-mates, and I had everything figured out, or so I thought. I did actually START the project. I got Lex in the studio, then after talking to Stephen about different spaces, I took her out of the studio... and that's kind of where it tapered off. It's not that I didn't like what I was doing, it's more that I didn't have the same fire for it that I did for the eye project. I do want to keep working on the dance thing because I didn't get anywhere close to where I wanted to be with my photos so far, but as a break I think I will be going in a different direction with the rest of the semester in terms of portraiture. I will get to that in another post, but for now, here is the development of the dance photos so far... mind you, they aren't even CLOSE to what I had envisioned originally; and hopefully they will get closer in the future if I decide to come back to it.

Self Portraits

As a continuous side project I do a lot of self portraiture. They say there is no better model than yourself, you are always available! and I agree with that full heartedly. Whenever I need a break from working on whatever, I love to break out some self portraits, they are like my little vacation. I do them often, and I like to make them as different as possible from what I'm doing at the time, often edgy and whimsical to make them as fun as they can be. This is a set of self portraits I've done over the past couple semesters including some from my first photo class, taken with my 35 mm film camera and some done in my first and second drawing classes as well as my painting class.

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Eyes Project

Since this blog's intent was to show Frank things we were working on outside of our critiqued work I tried not to upload any of the work I was working on for class and perfecting. These are all of my favorites from my Eyes project I did last semester. This was definitely my favorite project I've taken on to this date and I hope to find something as exciting for me in the future since right now I'm in a bit of a slump.

Lex

Whitney

Humza

Molly

Samantha

I'd like to continue this project as I get better as a photographer, maybe do some more blue eyes, I have a lot of green, lol, but this is definitely something I can see myself working on again.