Final Project.

For the final project I tried to find a similar characteristic between all of the past photographs I had taken for each of the projects.  And it seems that all of them have a touch of mystery, and darkness. But I'm not sure how to make a project out of mystery and darkness that is still cohesive and that makes sense to me. I've been thinking about setting up different scenes to tell a story, but that's not really something that appeals to me. I like finding pure moments in nature that I can capture with my camera. So I've decided that I want to make my final project about light, and our relationship as humans to light and how light can invoke different emotions. Also, the relationship between natural sunlight, and man-made light sources. 

I've also been trying to come up with how I'll display these images. I want them to be large. Because most of them will be "landscape" portraits. But I was thinking of using the transparency paper, and printing all of the images on one giant sheet.  From there I want to construct some sort of make-shift lamp. Either by using an existing lamp and fastening the sheet of pictures onto it almost like a lamp shade. I'm not sure how this will all work as of yet, I'm working on the lamp structure now, and trying to figure out the best way to display the pictures. 

I'm not sure if any of this even makes sense yet, but I'm hoping once I finish taking all the pictures that everything will sort itself out. 

Assignment FIVE

With this project I wanted to try to be a little more comical instead of dark and mysterious. So I decided to do fake mugshots. I searched through hundreds of mugshots on google, trying to figure out what to do. I found that in most mugshots the people aren't usually holding the number identification card, but I chose to have the people in my photographs hold it because then it became more of a tool of expression.

I tried replicating the horrible lighting most mugshots I saw online had, I used the flash on my camera and arranged a few lights around the subject so I could eliminate shadows, and create a dull, flat, image using my flash. In Photoshop I deleted the original background because I was using the wall in my living room which was a weird off-white color and had a odd texture. I chose a grey background because it's not distracting and it forces you to really focus on the subject. I also added bruising and blood to all of my subject's faces, and after doing that I realized that when viewed together these pictures could almost tell a story.

After looking at the final project all together, I like it a lot more than when I first started. I like the mystery behind mugshots, and I wanted each person to tell a different story only using their appearance. The way they stand, the facial expression, even the way they hold the I.D. card can all come together to form an idea about what happened to them.