Oliver Doran had come to show us and teach us how to get the best lighting and angles for taking a portrait, he also showed us how to make the subjects feel comfortable by interacting with them before he took their portrait. Oliver demonstrated how to use 1,2 and 3 point lighting to create portraits that made the model look best, along with putting the images in black and white. Furthermore, he showed us how to angle models to suit their facial features and how light can create shapes on the face such as the butterfly effect, which is when shadows are created under the nose.

Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra is a contemporary Dutch photographer. Known for her single portraits, usually working in series, she often focuses on particular groups and communities of people, such as mothers, adolescent and teenage boys and girls, soldiers, etc., with an emphasis on capturing the vulnerable side of her subjects.

Dijkstra is particularly concerned with the representation of youth and the transition to adulthood. Her portraits bear witness to the social pressures made visible on the bodies and faces of her subjects. Dijkstra often works in series, building upon the accumulation of detail and careful attention to minute differences in pictures taken months or years apart

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Dijkstra’s seminal series, Beach Portraits (1992–1994), is composed of life-sized colour photographs of young teenagers in bathing suits taken on both American and European beaches.

Dijkstra also did another series called Olivier (2000–03), which consists of seven formal portraits that follow a young man from the day he joins the French Foreign Legion to the day he graduates. Dijkstra had initially conceived the series to focus on a group of new recruits, but as they began to drop out of the project she decided to focus on Silva alone, who ‘stood out because he was so young and because the changes in him were so visible’

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“With young people, everything is much more on the surface—all the emotions,” the artist observed. “When you get older you know how to hide things.”

Rineke Dijkstra has also been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Rinkeke Dijkstra: A Retrospective,” which was shown at both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2012. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Goetz Collection in Munich, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

In Rineke Dijkstra Oliver series which consisted of her following a young boy from the start of his journey in the French Foreign Legion to the day he graduates. In these 7 photos you can see how much he has changed and grown into his surroundings from 2000-2003. I like how she pictures him in his different uniforms showing the different parts of the job he would be having to do. In the 3rd photo it looks like he has either dirt or paint on his facing which could mean he has just come back from training giving the impression that they are not scheduled photos that he gets cleaned and dressed up for.

My Portraits

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I have attempted to portraits after Oliver Doran had showed us how to used the correct lighting and angles so that we could get different shadows or no shadows at all. In the photos above I like how they have shadowing on the face but none on the background. I think it helps the viewer to focus more of the person and less on what’s around them. Also in all the images there are darker elements which contrast with the lighter background making the photos ‘pop’.