Close-Up Portrait
Gaze
The subject of this image is my mom looking out a window, but all you can see of her is the reflection. The setting is my dining room, but the setting you can see is my front yard. To create this image I took enough pictures to fill up my roll of film. Then I processed the film. I created a contact print and chose this image because it was the best one. I enlarged the print at F13 for 14 seconds. Instead of dropping the print in developer, I strategically poured developer to make the image look like it was dripping down the paper. I finish the process and dried my print. I wanted to create this image because it was a different way of capturing someone’s portrait.A composition technique in this image is high key lighting. Using high key lighting for this image made it more difficult to see the reflection. I like that because it makes someone stop and really look at the image and think about what the image could be trying to say. Another composition technique in this image is formal balance. The use of formal balance in this image make your eye drawn to the reflection. Rule of Thirds helps when you want to show more of the setting and add more negative space, I wanted the focus to be on the reflection and not the setting which is why I used formal balance.I think that this image is saying many things. One of them being intrigue and curiosity. The reflection shows that the person is looking at or watching something. That shows that they are curious. The curiosity shown in the image shows the immaturity or child that lives inside everyone. There are a few things that bother me in this project. The first thing is my pictures in general. I don’t think that the image I took are strong at all and you can barely see most of the images. To fix this, in the future, I am going to try to take most of my pictures outside because that is where the lighting is this best for my camera, because I cannot change the aperture. The other thing that bothers me is how light my enlarged prints are. I always expose my prints for shorter time because I don’t like really dark images, but I think I need to expose for longer to get darker blacks.