For my photo shoot I placed asked by subjects (my mum and dad) what room they believe they spend the most time in and where they find them selves most comfortable, this last point was essential as a lot of the time my parents are not in these rooms most of the time but it where they enjoy being the most and where they most feel at ease and comfortable. This was essential for the project as it aloud me to reflect their personalities through where they are most at home and comforted .Furthermore, i used the natural lighting found around my house and in each room as well as using the natural lighting coming from the windows to help produce the best images possible; this factor also help fully represent the most naturalist situation and truly highlight the significance of the environmental portraits and the deeper meaning that is shown throughout. After taking the photos i download them onto my computer and opened them up in light room which gave me the opportunity to scan through they efficiently and select the best images that i wanted to continue working on and edit.

After finally selecting my images i needed to decide how i wanted to continue on with them; overall i had some black and white images, colour images, overlaid images and finally some images i simply left the same as i believe the image did not need editing and the original was enough to project what I wanted it to.

Black and white images:

For my black and white images i generally chose the image that high over exposure due to the natural lighting of the room as it enabled be to help control this factor therefore leading t an overall improvement in the image. From the black and white images it also help me set a fairly neutral tone compared having a varse majority of bright colour which help control your eye to fixate on one point. For me this something i wanted to avoid with the up coming images; this was because there are so fine details in the background that i wanted the view to notice for example the Channel poster and my mum spotty scarf. This aloud an overall understanding of each image to be projected and represented.

Coloured images:

For my coloured images i wanted to project the comparison between my mum and dads comfort place as well as their opposite personalities, For my dad he was in his garage and has a more warm feeling to the image with a busy background, and light coming from behind him. Compared to my mum who was in the lounge with a more colder editing to the image, with natural lighting shining on to her face with a more simplistic background. To me this offers a large conceptual feature to be projected and displayed; then finally ending on a sharper image of them together which combined the colder and warmer image together creating a more contrasted and colourful image.

No editing image:

For these two image i decided i wanted to keep them the same to highlight the natural lighting and the type of colours our house has that will help reflect and represent their personalises as well as this in both images they have be#aming smiles which i think add to the idea of needing to be edited and the overall deeper meaning of the images.

Evaluation:

Overall I am responsibly happy and pleased with the final out come of my images of my home sweet home environmental images; i am pleased with the backgrounds and the concepts behind the decision making of what room my parents wanted to be photographed as it highlighted the essential idea about being comfortable and well ‘feeling at home’ this helped aid the deeper meaning and conceptual factors. Furthermore, i am happy with my edits as i feel it really helps demonstrate and represent each of my parents personalities and how they come together and work well as a team. However, next time i would maybe try get what room they are most comfortable in and where they most enjoy being compared to where they actually spend the most amount of time as this would enable an extremely interesting and different point of view as well as well as showing a further understanding of environmental photography and how it is used to tell and represent an individuals story through the use of photography and carefully though out editing.

Environmental portraits

An environmental portrait is a portrait which focuses on the individual or group of people surroundings rather then the actual people in the photograph. For example this could be participants workplace or home life but typically the background always has a meaning to the people in the image and could be argued that its a reflection of themselves. Furthermore its suggest that by photographing people in their natural environment you are more likely to get an understanding and grasp their true characteristics and therefore portray an essence of the unique personality traits asides to just getting a physical understanding from their own physical features- leave room for more interpretation and story telling. As well as these point due to the fact the model will be in their own environment it’s much likely they will be much more comfortable and will therefore be more relaxed during the shoot compared if they were in the studio, where its likely they will feel more awkward and possibly produce more rigid photographs. All this in mind its key to consider the details of the surroundings, whilst i have already suggested that the background may dominate the subject, it is not always the case. In fact there have been many environmental photographers that have conveyed messages through the use of the background in a subtle way however still be proven to be significant. Overall highlighting the importance and the thought that needs to go in to the individual and their background in order create meaning and purpose for that person in particular.

For my own environmental portraits I will be looking closely at Larry Sultan and Alec Soth own environmental portraits to help give me inspiration in order to create my own images, this will help benefit my own work and allow room for development. For my own shoot for environmental portraits i will use the methodology of my own home and my family environment in order to add a more personal touch and will give me opportunity to add my own ideas.

Some of Larry Sultan and Alec Soth’s environmental portraits:

Planning my own environmental portraits- Getting to know my subjects

Robert Gow- father

• 50 years male patterned with Veronica Blair
• Works as a computer engineer for a building company and require him to travel round the island to different buildings in order to help with the computer aspects of the property
• Works from 8am-7m, Monday to Saturday and occasionally a Sunday if he is required to come in
• In Roberts spare time he enjoys gardening with his girlfriend and working on projects- most recently building and electric bike from scratch. As well as going out for family meal to his favourite restaurant and a big soft spot for his two kittens
• He spends most of his time in the garage working on his personal projects or overtime projects for his work, as well as his paintings on the walls and cleaning his pride possession of his rose red race car.

Veronica Blair- Mother

• 50 years old girlfriend to Robert Gow
• Works a directorial manager at a Trust company, working with her clients in person and online. She has suggested that its an extremely stressful and busy job due to the large work load and long hours.
• Works from 7am-8/9pm on a Monday through to Sunday and gets a day off which changes each week depending on her clients, work load and family
• In Veronica’s spare time she likes to spend time in the garden with her boyfriend when she has the time, enjoy playing Mario cart with the family and much like my dad loves going out for dinner at her favourite restaurant
• For my mum, her favourite room in the house where she spends the most time is the kitchen as it normally where we will sit as a family or where I do my homework, this is because due to the fact she is always very busy when she is home she likes to spend as much time as she can with her boyfriend and me

I live with both my subjects and therefore know rich in depth detail about both their personality traits and therefore I will get a better opportunity to really grasp the importance of surroundings that will truly reflect the key significance of the background to each subject. My action plan is further grasp both my parents opinions on the importance of our own house hold and to reflect their personality and their belief through photographs.

Still life is the painting or drawing of an arrangement of objects, typically including fruit or flowers.

History of still life in art:

Still-life as an art form first originated from Ancient Egyptian highly codified mortuary rituals. Egyptians at the time believed that objects represented on the walls of a tomb or inside a sarcophagus would accompany the dead in the afterlife. They would often include Funerary paintings, embellishment elements which are added to the resting place of the dead, to the walls of the tomb. These paintings included objects such as crops, meat and fish, all of which they believed would travel with the individual into the afterlife.

Greek and Romans later realised similar types of paintings though they did not associate any religious symbolism to it. However, unlike Egyptian frescoes which were not using any perspective or shading, Greek and Roman started to develop a somewhat sophisticated form of still-life art, more realistic and detailed.

Many mosaics and paint works survived in Pompeii under the ashes that covered the town when Mount Vesuvius volcano exploded in 79AD. The scenes and objects depicted by the Roman mosaics and paintings show the importance that the Romans put on hospitality, commonly the still-life artworks that have been unearthed in Pompeii and Herculaneum, show offering of food and water made by the hosts to the guests.

Jumping to the 19th century, still life began to fall from favor due to the rise of European Academies. Academies taught the “Hierarchy of genres”, which held that a painting’s artistic merit was based mainly on the subject in the work. After neoclassicism went into decline in the 1830’s, genre and portrait painting became the main focus for the Romantic and Realist revolutions. The still-life paintings of Gustave Courbet, Eugene Delacroix and Francisco Goya portray strong emotional currents, and are less concerned about accuracy and more interested in mood.

Vincent Van Gogh has become one of the most famous painters in history, and his still-life work of sunflowers, done during the 19th century, is well known by many. He uses mostly yellow tones and light shadowing to bring the flowers to life.

Analysis of still-life image:

Although Sir Nathaniel Bacon did not paint professionally, he was a skilled amateur artist. This type of art and subject matter, a cookmaid surrounded by fruits and vegetables, are more associated with Dutch and Flemish art. It is unusual in England for that period in time, however Bacon may have been influenced by pictures of this type during his travels in the low country, and therefore bought the style back with him. Every item in the image is known to have grown in England, and reflects a part of Bacon’s life as he was a keen gardener and successfully grew melons on his Suffolk estate.

In this image, the first thing you see is the woman in the middle. She stands out against the rest of the image, being the only living thing surrounded by fruit and vegetables. You can see all types of fruit and vegetables, such as melons, parsnips, horse radish, lettuce and apples. The amount of fruit and vegetables in the image portrays the wealth of the owner, which was Sir Nathaniel Bacon. You can also see the singular flower wreath to the top left of the image, next to the maid’s head. The image seems to follow the rule of three. The background is split into three, with the left wall, the gap where you can see the outside of the building, and the right wall. There are also three large lettuces on the right side of the image, three large pumpkins/melons at the bottom, and three small lemons on the left side, on the table. The tone of the image seems quite cold and dark, there’s no sunlight and the clouds in the distance are grey and gloomy.

All Photos from the war are in black and white. So I decided to convert some of my images from the tunnels to black and white to make them feel more authentic and of the time period. I used lightroom when trying to achieve these black and white outcomes.

Using the starting tools, I gave images 3 stars to images that i wanted to take forward for editing. This meant that the editing process was made faster and more concise because i had all the images i wanted to use in one place at one time. When using the develop tool looking a the left hand side slider bar I turned on the black and white slider. This automatically changes the image to the black and white settings the computer programme deems to be the best levels of light and dark for the image.

With the sliders I experimented pushing the light and dark to the extremes. Also using the tonal color sliders with in the setting of blue,red,green etc. I chose to try make this image look more like an xray to experiment with the different settings in lightroom and familiarise myself with them.

Working on a different image . Changing this to black and white on the automatic setting is the best way for me to have a base image in black and white to go from and then edit in the way i want so the base photo doesn’t start off to dark or two light.

Using the slider tools I edit the brightness and contrast and enhance the blacks and whites with the B&W sliders so the there is more of a contrast within the images.

With this images I was using the color sliders to work on the more finer blue purple and red tones within the image so the wall area ended up with more of a grey tone rather than a harsh bright white tone at the back.

Again this was just an experimentation with the black and white sliders seeing what it was like when I push the sliders opposite ways to what i would normally have them . This gave the image an almost cartoon effect which i do like but it doesn’t really fit with the style of this project with images looking more older fashion. This looks more like modern pop art.

With is image I changed all the setting myself rather than setting it to the black and white default settings. I felt that in this image the great at the back was getting lost in the picture and I wanted to change that so it is more noticeable.

In this image I made the alterations i wanted to so the back ground great is more noticeable. I did this by slightly editing the exposure and the the white sliver upping these each a tiny bit. This also had an effect on the stairs so where the white was there was more of a reflection being shown from it. Also the lines of rust running down are more defined. You can see each individual strip a lot clearer.

I decided to change my approach with this image and see if cropping the picture will give a different impression or effect. Using the cropping tool i lined up the box to where i wanted my image to be cropped. I wanted to make sure i included in my crop the 3 main focal points of the image ; the stairs, the grid at the back and the light corner of the wall.

When cropping the image i found that it looked good but i felt like the story in the image is lost because you cant see the full stairs going up to the grid hatch. Also i felt like you couldn’t tell really what the image was about and it looks more like a modern art conceptual piece rather than a historical recollection photo shoot.