Unique Lighting

For this image, I tried a few different lighting styles. I tested out long exposure, but couldn’t find a setting where the light became the focus of the image as I had planned. I decided I might try bright artificial light with a flashlight instead. I took a few different photos, shining the flashlight on my face at different angles. I thought the unedited image I chose to move into photoshop was the most interesting because the lighting was the most dramatic. I knew I wanted to add a more complex background than the plain wall I had behind me in the photo, so I then went outside and took some photos of the woods in my backyard, zooming in on the trees. I thought it might make a more interesting background and give the photo a very different setting and mood.

For photo editing, I first edited the two separate images in photos: for both, I reduced the exposure, increased the brilliance, strengthened the shadows, increased the contrast, and decreased the brightness. I then moved the photo of the trees into photoshop. I added a layer over the background layer and put the other portrait image on it. Using the magnetic selection tool, I selected the area around me and erased the original background of the image. Using the blur tool, I made the edges fade into the background image a little more. While on the same layer, I also used the dodge tool to highlight the brightest parts of the light a little more, and the burn tool to emphasize where the image fades into the darkness of the background image. Moving back to the background layer, I used the burn tool near the top of the image and the dodge tool in the bottom right corner of the image so that the lighting was a little more consistent in the two images. To help with this I added a gradient from white to transparent at a low opacity from near the bottom right corner extending to the edge of the subject’s head. Finally, I added the film grain filter over the image as a whole, changing its setting to “vertical.” I reduced the contrast to zero because the image was already quite dark, and reduced the intensity to about 2 so the filter wasn’t too obvious, but helped to further unify the two images that I edited together. I enjoyed figuring out how to help the two images coordinate more.

2To connect to my personal concentration of representing literary devices through photography, I wanted the photo to emphasize one feature more than the other elements of the photo editing. This ended up being the shadows in the image. This is to represent amplification, or increasing the intensity of a statement/idea by using repetition and other strategies to emphasize your point. The shadows in the image are emphasized both by the photo editing that strengthened the contrast and decreased the brightness, and by the intensity of the lighting. By using the lighting, I wanted to create a very dramatic effect in the photo.