Maciek Jasik

This photograph is a part of Maciek Jasik's series, 'A Thousand Souls' in which he intends to 'shed light on this great expanse within us'. He does this through the use of colour and blur throughout the portraits in this series. In this photo, Jasik uses vivid purple lighting to create a dark purple background and a magenta hue on the subject, especially their body. However, the subject's face does not have this vivid colour and has more cool tones and lighting, contrasting with the bright magenta. This brings the focal point of the image to the subject's face. This is also achieved through the composition as the portrait is taken as a head shot and so naturally the focus is on the face, but moreover, the head is in the centre of the image whereas the body is coming from a side angle and is out of frame. This clearly shows the intention to have the portrait focused on the subject's face. Additionally, the shallow depth of field means that the body is not in focus and also there is blur across the image, except for the subject's facial features. Perhaps Jasik chose to put emphasis on the subjects features to achieve his aim of 'shedding light on this great expanse within us' by showing features such as the eyes as a possible window into the soul. Overall, I am intrigued by Jasik's use of selecting which areas of the portrait are blurred and which are not and I especially will aim to replicate his bold choice of lighting in my own responses.

First, I opened the image in Camera Raw and edited the basic settings to increase contrast, slightly increased vibrance, and edited the texture, clarity and added a subtle vignette. I then reduced noise and removed any chromatic aberration. In some images, I used the colour mixer settings to adjust the lighting and create more intense colours to resemble Jasik's work. I then opened the image in Photoshop and added a Nik Filter with Analog Efex Pro 2 and used the double exposure camera setting to create a more diffused background and in some images also used light leaks to emphasise this. I added a slight vignette and then added the filter before converting to a smart object. This then enabled me to add a field blur on the image. I then used the layer mask to slightly erase certain areas of the blur, particularly the eyes to ensure they're in focus. I finally added the brightness and contrast adjustment layer and slightly enhanced both.