Portraits

The portrait assignments were first to take photos of another person in a unique and thought-provoking way that maybe wasn't just a face or exactly that. For the other assignment, we had to take pictures of ourselves, "selfies" without actually having our faces in the photo. Whether it was just a body part or an intentional blur. In my opinion, the thing that makes a portrait successful also makes other kinds of photos successful. I think that it's the ability the photo has to convey emotion and a message through its visuals. If a portrait can do either of those things it is successful. I really liked trying to tell a story through my images. I also enjoyed practicing taking portraits without including the face. My personal 3 favorite photos from these photo shoots were; 1, the one with max holding the phone in his hand. I think it's compositionally a beautiful photo as well as its casualness. Max and I were actually screwing around when we took that photo and it wasn't even our prop but the look of seriousness on his face is so quizzical and storytelling it looks professionally shot. the next two that I like are the one with the ukelele because I think it was well edited and tells some kind of story. The last one is the one of my girlfriend with a soda in hand pointing at something in the window. I like this one because of its sporadic feel yet it's following quite a few compositional guidelines and makes it feel well-shot. I practiced playing with aperture and depth of field the most in this shoot and it's very apparent in these photos in my opinion.

In this assignment, we were tasked to simply take portrait photos of people with certain guidelines. In one photoshoot I did with a classmate and friend, Max Dreskin we had two props. the first being a rotary telephone that we took the leftmost photo on the bottom. Then the second prop is the Ukelele. The interesting thing about portrait photography is that the person's face doesn't have to be entirely included or included at all. With some of the photos I zoomed in really far on max's face or I used a depth of field effect to blur his face or even only a single body part of his was in the photo. But he was always still in the photo enough which made it a portrait. The unique thing about photography is something that most people don't realize. The person in the photo does not have to be the main subject or a subject at all. It's how you utilize that person's being and other effects to create a special and unique portrait of that person.

In this assignment we picked a photographer and did an analysis of both the photographers brief contextual background and a visual analyis of their photography and specifically one image that we chose. I ended up doing mine on Marco Grob a celebrity portrait photographer.