It took days for me to finally decide on the shots that I liked the most. During the first round of photo taking, I was still working out which angle I was gonna take the pictures from as well as the amount of lighting that I’m gonna be working with. Moreover, while I had specific costumes in mind, I felt like it didn’t turn out as I liked on camera. Thus, I also made several changes to my clothes and props. After several days of trial and error, here are the final outputs that I was most satisfied with.

To take a headshot, I think the hardest decision to come up with was determining if I want to take the picture with a serious face or not, as well as if I want to take it while wearing glasses. Ultimately, I took multiple photos with all options anyway. However, there was another obstacle which was that I felt that the pictures were too plain. I didn’t think that changing clothes would help either, since more color might be too distracting or would not make a good contrast with the background. This was where I remembered the black and white headshot photos that I have seen when I was looking for inspiration. 

I expected that taking a headshot would be hard since there is not much room to experiment but it was harder than I thought, especially since I was planning on doing a black and white photo. After each round of pictures, I usually sample the best ones on Affinity Photo to see if the output is good. I then realized that good lighting was much more crucial for monochromatic images. Some constant problems with the photos were that the background, shadows, and contrast were unsatisfactory. Thus, I tried a lot of things with the lighting such as positioning it closer, higher, and even situating it so that the light does not hit my face straight on. Finally, after days of experimenting with the position of the lighting as well as the exposure settings, I finally got a shot with great subject and background contrast. The shot has my desired lighting wherein the light comes from only one side, leaving a dark shadow on the other. Additionally, it had a great amount of subject and background contrast which shows up nicely when turned to black and white.

For the post-processing of the headshot photo, I took time in cleaning up some parts of the background using the healing brush and patch tools. I especially made sure that it looked as even as possible. Using the same tool, I also cleaned up some hair strands that were sticking out. After that, I made some basic adjustments to the contrast, vibrance, shadows, and white balance of the picture. I made sure to focus on giving adequate contrast that is not too high nor too low. Then, I added the black and white effect and turned down the amount for the red and the magenta channels since those were the main colors present in the picture. I made sure to set it to an amount that blends out the background even better but not too much that you can’t see the outline of my head. Doing so gave me the dark and moody effect that I wanted. Finally, I added a bit of exposure. The result is a photo that puts emphasis on my face without any distracting elements.

As someone that spends the majority of my time at home, my laptop is practically my best friend. I do almost everything on it including university activities, leisurely editing, watching entertaining shows, and more. Hence, I wanted to do a concept that showcases how I usually am when I am sitting behind my desk, doing all sorts of things on my laptop. For the candid photo, I experimented with different angles and props before ultimately deciding on this shot of me seemingly working on something. I shot this with my light source positioned slightly in front of my laptop which gave it a silhouette-like effect. Additionally, I used a yellow-tinted light which, combined with the red background, gave off a warm orange lighting effect. If I had used normal white lighting for this shot, there would have been a slight discrepancy between the warm orange top that I was wearing, the cool red background, as well as the color of my lips which was a cool pink. Hence why I used strongly tinted lighting to blend the colors together and get rid of the mismatch.

In the earlier stages of this project, I had taken pictures similar to it but felt like I could do more to make it more interesting. Thus, while this particular shot was taken pretty quickly, it was the result of days spent playing around with different camera angles. I can also say that the screen mirroring I did helped me the most for this. Since the concept makes it necessary that the laptop is placed right in front of me, it gave me the advantage of seeing the view from the camera very clearly, thus making it easier for me to see which positioning looks good. Consequently, it was possible for me to deliberately make sure that the laptop tilts diagonally in the same direction that my head is facing. Personally, I like how the angle makes it feel like I am seeing myself while working. Combined with my arm which somewhat connected with the laptop’s silhouette, the overall output makes for an interesting composition, in my opinion.

Post-processing for the candid photo was much less than that of my headshot output. Originally taken with me at the center of the frame, I cropped and positioned it so that my face falls on the upper right intersection of the grid. Since the cropping already made me satisfied with the picture, I only added a bit more contrast and tweaked some of the settings to make it less warm and saturated. Aside from that, I also edited out some hair strands that I thought were too exposed.