Close up photography refers to a tightly cropped shot that shows a subject (or object) up close and with significantly more detail than the human eye usually perceives. The extreme close up shot is generally used to allow the viewer to enter the character’s personal space, revealing traits and emotions that might otherwise go unnoticed. The frame is so tight that using an extreme close up shot gives the viewer no choice but to experience the character’s feelings alongside them.
Satoshi Fujiwara
Satoshi Fujiwara is a contemporary artist and photographer who was born in Kobe, Japan and is currently based in Berlin, Germany. He has produced and contributed to several art books such as Code Unknown, this book consisted of portraits taken by Fujiwara while he was on a subway in Berlin of his fellow passengers. As he knew he couldn’t publish pictures of people without their consent or knowledge he edited them so that identifying the person was practically impossible. Using shadows and various compositional approaches, as well as digital processing, framing, and trimming, Fujiwara modified the “code” of his secret portraits, thereby also circumventing the right of likeness. Accustomed to the homogeneity of Japanese society, he was struck by the diversity of people and the diffusion of codes he encountered.
Code Unknown I 
Code Unknown III 
Code Unknown I 
Code Unknown II 
Code Unknown II 
Code Unknown I
“I took these pictures over a period of several months while riding various subway lines in Berlin from morning to night. The city is home to people from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds. On the train, the air is not only filled with German, English, and other European languages, but also many languages from the Middle East and Asia. To someone like me, who was born and raised in a racially homogenous country like Japan, it seems as if these codes, unleashed from every direction and unmixed, form a diffuse reflection.” -Satoshi Fujiwara
Contact Sheets
These are a couple of my contact sheets which show the different types of close-up photos that we took. As you can see we tried different lighting and many different angles to try and get the perfect photos for each person.
Editing
These are some of my edited photos in lightroom, in most of the photos I have only adjusted a few of the different settings, these include exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows. For the edit of the right, I decrease the shadows so that the final photo was darker, by doing this the shadows around the eyes and nose are more prominent. In the edit on the left, I have decreased highlights instead so the lighting on the left side of the face wasn’t as shiny or bright.
Final Portraits
I have chosen these photos as my final ones as I feel that they each have different lighting which compliments the model in the photos. I really like the bottom left photo as it is a close-up of her face where you can see all the different features such as her smile lines, I also like that she is looking away from both the camera and the light which means the camera captures the shadowing around the nose and mouth as the light is on the other side facing the camera. Another one that I think shows the model’s feature nicely is the top middle, by the way, the camera angles and how she is looking towards the camera you can see the different heading in the eyes and the different texture of the hair as it frames her face.