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Photo assignment: “home sweet home”

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For this assignment I will be taking environmental and candid portraits within the home.

An environmental portrait is an image taking of someone, where their surrounding is important as it contains information or clues towards someone’s personal story.

A Candid portrait is an image taken of people when they’re unaware. Unlike environmental portraits, the scene is not artificially set which means that this photography style is used to capture natural, raw moments.

Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan (July 13, 1946 – December 13, 2009) was an American photographer from California. He taught at the San Francisco art institute and at the California college of arts.

“I love making pictures, even if most of the results are lousy.” – Source

His book “pictures from home” was published in 1992, and is a collection of images he took of is parents in the 80s.

“The demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live for ever.” – Source

Candid photography photo shoot

Plan:

After looking at Larry Sultan’s work, I decided I also wanted to photograph family. I chose to photograph my dad as he is my closest family member meaning I can get a realistic representation of him. I chose to photograph him as I know that he has multiple varied roles in the house and I thought that it would be interesting to see the contrasts. I do not plan on intentionally creating scenarios, instead I plan on taking images of him doing things naturally that I think I could photograph in an interesting way.

1st selection of images- I flagged the images that I thought were the best from my entire photo shoot.
Here you can see all the flagged images.
Next, I colour coded my flagged images with green being the best photos, yellow being the ok images, and the red being the ones I didn’t think were very good.

Edits:

To edit these images I used a very similar approach. I increased the contrast slightly in order to make the subject stand out more,and I increased the vibrancy on each image in order to bring more colour to the selection of images.

Technical: I took this image using manual focus so that the hand was very clear, and the background slightly blurred. I used a shutter speed of around 1/250, and flash to brighten the scene,
Context: I took this image of my dad while he was in his home office.
Visual: It is clear that this image was taken from an unusual perspective as were able to see a side view from behind the subject. The background is filled with books and stacks of paper making it clear that it is an office environment. we can also see a faded tattoo on the subject’s hand.
Conceptual: I think that this image is very interesting as we cannot see the subject’s face, however we still see some elements of their personality through the background and through the tattoo.

Daniel Meadows

Daniel meadows was born in Gloucestershire, England on the 28 Jan 1952.

“As a photographer, my principal subject was – and remains – the British people,” – Source

From January 1972 he rented a barber shop in Manchester and invited people in to have their portraits taken for free. He team out of money in two months but had gained good experience. In the 70s he became interested in becoming a teacher and was invited to help teach documentary photography at Newport college of art and design.

“I’m not interested in celebrities, just ordinary folk.”– Source

Environmental portrait shoot

Plan:

After looking at Daniel’s work, I like how he took images of people who weren’t as personal to him. I plan on taking images of one of my friends in their bedroom as I feel it is a personal environment to them and it allows us to see elements of their personality. This shoot with be slightly more staged as I will need to position the subject in order to get successful environmental portraits and the subject will be more aware of my presence.

Here are all the outcomes from the shoot.
Here you can see the images I flagged s part as my 1st selection
Next I colour coded the images based on how successful I thought they were

Edits:

To edit this image, I increased the contrast as there are a lot of different colours in the images on the wall, and I wanted them to stand out. I also increased the highlights and decreased the white. All this combined helped the white balance look more appropriate and it also helped add more colour to the photo.
Although this does not show the subject, it allows us to learn about them since it shows their interests and what sort of images they like.
To achieve the outcome below, I increased the contrast slightly to make the green and black look more prominent amongst all the white. I increased the highlight and white in order to make the overall appearance of the photo appear brighter. Decreasing the shadow helped make the image less dark.
I think that this image is successful as it shows the subject’s passion. It is clear from this picture that the subject is a dancer or enjoys dance as we can see a sign referring to the activity and because we can also see a trophy to the left which may have been dance related.
to begin, I slightly increased the exposure because I thought my image looked slightly dark. I then increased the contrast in order to make sure the image didn’t look over exposed. I then increased the highlights so that the picture looked brighter, and I decreased the shadow to make sure the overall aesthetic of the photo was bright.
To begin with, this image was slightly over exposed due to the excess light coming in from the window. To fix this, I decreased the exposure until I felt the picture looked balanced. I then increased the contrast so that all the colours in the photo didn’t look washed out amongst the white background. To make sure the room looked clear and bright, I increased the whites and the highlights. One aspect of the image I really wanted to capture were the fairy lights. However since it was still very light outside I was not able to capture the slight yellow tint they were emitting. Because of this, I increased the temperature to a point where I felt it looked quite natural and as it it was due to the lights. This was important for me to capture as I felt like it makes the image look more homely and cosy, and less cold and clinical.

Technical: This picture was taken using portrait mode, and the exposure time was 1/30.
Context: I took this image of a friend in their bedroom.
Visual: In this picture we see a subject in bed. The image is very bright and the background appears very white and clean. On the bottom Left hand side of the image we see a photo frame with an image in it, and 2 plants. Behind the subject we can see an image wall which resembles a mood board.
Conceptual: The main concept of this picture was to try and capture the subject’s personality. The picture frame on the side does this as it shows the subject’s friends. We can also learn a lot about the person through the images they chose to display on their wall. The fairy lights also add a homely warmth to the image.

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