Photoshoots 1 and 2 – Self Portraits

Photoshoot plan

Genre	Lighting	Props	Camera Settings	Idea	Location
Portraiture	Artificial	Tripod	Continuous shooting (10 at once)	Self – portraiture	Home – lounge and bedroom

Plan

Contact Sheets

Using purple colour coding to show my best images after flagging.

Editing

Edit – specifically using high grain in this image as well as the vignette

Edit – using selenium tone B and W filter

Overall I think my editing was quite successful – at first, I tried editing in colour but due to the poor light quality in these images, I changed to black and white. I prefer editing in black and white with high contrast and grain even with better-lit images so this worked well.

After doing numerous edits in black and white, I created copies of various best images and began to experiment with colour grading in colour, and then in black and white. I don’t know if these images will necessarily be in my final outcomes but I still think they were quite successful.

In this image – I used highlights of blue and mid tones of red and I think the outcome was successful.

My experimentation with colour grading was helpful as it will be something I can use later on in this project, for example when editing other images for different parts of the project.

Final Images

Evaluation

This photoshoot could be improved. The lack of good lighting impacted the quality of my images as I was shooting using overhead lighting that was too warm-toned. I tried to combat this with white balance, ISO and using a cool tone which did help slightly but I think I will carry out another photoshoot of self-portraits with much better light, possibly in another location. I want to touch on my identity linked to the location in the photos, which I did touch on a little in this shoot but due to struggles with lighting my locations were limited around my house. I plan to re-develop this shoot at my grandmother’s house, or again at my house, now that I have gotten to grips with the correct camera settings, using my tripod effectively and positioning myself in the way I want compositionally. However, I think this photoshoot was in some parts successful – I produced quite a few images which I like, showing my personality which was a strong point of this shoot. I wanted to bring across my identity in this photoshoot, and then be able to link this later on to how this links with my mother and grandmother’s identities, both now and also with the help of archival material, which then forms the main idea of my project. Having completed this photoshoot, I am going to carry out another self-portrait shoot which links more directly to my archival material and with better lighting quality.

Photoshoot 2

Lighting	Subject	Location	Idea	Theme	Props	Settings
Natural, window lighting with some overhead lights.	Myself	Bedroom, living room	Personal Identity, generational identity, adolescence	Self-portraiture	Tripod, camera.	Creative Auto, portrait.

Photoshoot plan

Aims of the shoot

This shoot is a development of my last self-portrait shoot. As I discussed above in my evaluation for my last shoot, I have gained further inspiration from photographing archival family images. These images have given me inspiration for posing, framing and editing – I plan to juxtapose archival and new images in my photo book and I feel that the development of this new shoot will generate further images that will draw clearer comparisons between the two sets of images. This photoshoot is in the same location as my last shoot: my bedroom and living room, which are two places of significant personal identity to me. I wanted to show this through my poses, background and attitudes throughout my shoot, taking inspiration for these aspects from my archival images. In this shoot, I aimed to take images with improved lighting quality than my last shoot – as shown above, I took my images too late in the day which produced poorly lit and overly grainy images, and this shoot was planned in part because of this also.

Contact Sheets

At the start of my shoot, I struggled with the yellow lighting and warm tones of my living room. I shot in a better light than my last shoot, so I had less of a problem but it was still unhelpful – I only took a few images here and then moved to my bedroom.

After moving to my bedroom the lighting improved – I only used natural light which helped me in producing clear images. In my lounge I struggled with yellow-toned lighting which reduced the quality of my work – natural light helped.