As my final piece for the portrait topic I decided to focus my main piece around the photographer Paul M Smith. Smith’s most famous work consists of having the same model perform different roles and characters in the same photograph. I quite liked this idea of photography as it allowed me to be my own model, photographer and perform in activities I enjoy doing, such as fixing my bike and playing rugby.

As an example of Paul M Smiths work I decided to focus my main piece on a sports day, he took a series of photos of Robbie Williams as multiple people at a football match, whereas my version was myself as members of the crowd at a rugby match, as the try scorer and as the cameraman getting a photo of the try that I scored.

I liked the outcome of this photo as I individually cut out the figures and placed them onto the original background, this too quite a lot of time, as I was trying to get the perfect cutout of me in each position. I then perfectly matched them up to where their original positions were. The trickiest figure to place was the photographer as I had to adjust the size to make it seem life like compared to the player scoring the try, I also had to bring him forward to the line to make his figure look as if it wasn’t floating so rested it on the white line as a base. I really enjoyed this photo shoot as it allowed me to express what I like doing as well as taking photos of myself doing it.

I chose to do this rugby shoot as an example of Gender Identity as it shows my masculinity as a rugby player and supporter, which gives a stereotypical look to it. I would’ve liked to have had more of myself as the supporters but given the such small area to focus on the figures would’ve been overlapping each other and would’ve looked poor in standard.

Here is the photo Paul M Smith came out with 

 

Another  photo shoot I did was of me in my kitchen in my house. I chose to do this photo shoot as it shows the less masculine side of doing house-hold chores such as, the washing up and cooking. This shows how it doesn’t change your masculinity to do something not stereotypical of a man to do. I decided to do a different version of one of Smith’s photos. In his there is a man performing the roles of soldiers including the one getting buried. That photo shows masculinity as being a solider is a stereotypical mans role to perform, whereas my photo shoot is almost the opposite.

I really like this outcome as I added in a cast shadow on the floor to make it seem more life like, this was tricky as I had to copy the selected shape and then I changed it to black and white, then I changed the opacity and the fill layers, to change the darkness and to make it seem more shadow like.

Here is Paul M Smiths Army picture 

My third and final shoot for this topic was myself fixing my bike. I quite liked this outcome as it was tricky even though I only posed twice, but because of the spokes in the tyre it made it tricky to line up and fit in with the background, but with a bit of editing I made it work.  I decided to do one fixing a bike as it seemed masculine to me, as in a stereotype place, women don’t fix bikes, so thought it was a good idea to do.