Photo Assignment 3

Goal:

• To create portraits of a person that will tell your audience about their personality, work, or interests

Turn In:

• 6 – 8 images of a single individual in a significant/meaningful environment. If applicable, you may shoot this assignment with the subject of your documentary project.

Guidelines:

• Good editorial value - tell us, visually, something interesting about that person

• Think about how to show that person – what’s important about his/her personality? Mood? Experience? Hobby or profession? You can also ask your subject for ideas about the meaningful locations, props, etc.  

• For this assignment, you are allowed to pose/direct the person you're photographing. Many good environmental portraits are sort of a combination of candid/posed - you might ask to meet an artist in her studio and ask her to work on a project, for example, then take some candid pictures of her as she works.  It's best to include at least one posed photo when you are doing an environmental portrait shoot. 

• You may not submit pictures of animals.

• You may not submit pictures of more than one person.

• Use a variety of shots (wide, middle, close-up, etc)

• Be creative– but all your creativity should be INTENTIONAL and MEANINGFUL.  Feel free to use other techniques you’ve learned – making use of tricky lighting, silhouettes and shadows, composition rules, motion, etc. 

• Find a way to make your images INTERESTING!  - use perspective, angles, lines, light, etc.

• Remember, if the background is distracting, shoot with a larger aperture to get a shallower depth of field

• pay attention to the clothes your subject wears - try to choose something that won't be distracting to the overall look/feel of the image

• think about including portraits that don't show the subject's face (for example, a close-up detail of hands or eyes, a silhouette, etc)

• Your caption should indicate if the subject was posed.

Grading:

• This assignment is worth 100 points.

• News/Editorial Value:  Your photos should tell a story and mean something.  In particular, with the environmental portrait, the connection between the subject and the setting (place, mood, props, etc) should be clear or at least provoking. You might think about explaining this connection in part of your caption.

• Lightroom: You MUST process your images through Lightroom and do the proper adjustments to highlights/shadows, sharpness, etc., as needed.  You will add captions and retitle the images as we discussed in class. Your images will export from Lightroom as .jpg files.

• Captions:  You must caption your photos according to AP style guidelines and attach captions to the photos as metadata.  Each caption should have two complete sentences: the first sentence, in present tense, explains what is happening in that photo and includes the day, date, and location. The second sentence gives more general information about the overall context or significance of the specific content of the image.  The captions should be properly punctuated and contain proper grammar and spelling. DOUBLE-CHECK YOUR GRAMMAR AND SPELLING. You will have points deducted for errors. You may use the same caption for two or more photos if that makes sense.

• Remember, show people only your best work!