Photographs.

Before I started talking photographs for real, I wanted to test some out first so I got my sister to be my model and had her stand against a cream wall. I think the lighting of the photographs was quite bad on these photographs, as when I had the room light on it showed the shadow behind her on the wall therefore I had to turn the light off and have the flash on the camera on, which I think looked better. Also because my sister is near enough the same height as me which means the photographs did not look as good so I had to stand on a table to get some height to I could take the photographs at a slight angle as I think the bottom left looks better than the top right, mainly because of the lighting but also the angle.

I stated in my brief I would not get my model to wear makeup, however looking at these I think it would be a good idea to highlight and contour their face just to make their features stand out more against the lights.

I took some sample photographs on her emotions and all these three emotions were meant to be happy emotions, so to get the right face expression, I started to tickle her to make her laugh. I think this photograph could be improved if she did not put her head back to make her have a double chin but also her eyes more open and her head facing more forward.

With this photograph I told her to laugh however I think you can tell this is a fake expression also her head is not straight on and that piece of hair at the front of her face is annoying and needed to be moved. I think this photograph could be a lot better mainly if her head was facing more forward and I was a bit further away while taking the photograph.

Out of all three of these photographs I think this one is the best mainly because her facial expression is not put on and her face is a natural reaction to her being tickled and having a happy emotion. I think out of all the test photographs this one is the most successful because her head is straight forward and the emotion is not put on however there is an annoying piece of hair across her face which, I think, ruins this photograph.

I decided to edit my practise photographs just to test out some techniques I could use, the first technique I tried was the 3D effect, for this I had to duplicate the layer of her face, I then double clicked the top layer, went to advanced blending and unclicked the R. I the moved the two layers around to see what position they looked the best in. I think this effect works well especially against the dark coloured background. I quite like the 3D effect as it makes the masks stand out more but also adds a bit of colour to the image as I think just having it all black and white would be too dull. Also I smudged part on her face on the left hand side, although because it is quite small however on a larger scale you would be able to see it more, as at the beginning I tried blending her face to try and make it seem like she had no features however I struggled to do it as I did not know what to do and the blending tool and smudge tool did nothing so after a while I left it with the left hand slightly disorientated.

For this image, I chose two photographs with different emotions on, I then made them overlap and changed the effect on each one as you can see from the screenshots on the right. For layer 1 I changed it to subtract and layer 0 I changed that to multiply. Which therefore made the two photographs work better together. Although the faces are overlapping each other you are still able to see the emotion on each of the faces. I really like this image because I like how there is a shadow/boarder around the outside because it makes you eyes focus more on the faces in the centre. As these were my test photographs, the emotion my model was doing look fake and don’t show real emotion so I think on my real photographs, I am hoping they will look more real which is what I want the final images to look like.

To get this effect I had both photographs, one were she was smiling and another where her face was trying to show no emotion, I overlapped the two photographs I then just changed layer 0, I changed the blend mode to hue and then changed the opacity which then made all the colours change and her eyes more blue, which worked well as her faces are positioned differently so it draws your attention more to the photograph underneath and I think the smile face shows more than the other so I think having the effect and changing the opacity on the smile face made the face underneath stand out more which I think makes this image better as you can see them both more clearly but also because it has more colour in so it makes it more interesting and less boring.

Instead of having two photographs and over lapping them, I chose to have 4 different photographs and overlap them . I think this worked well as all the four photographs are different and shows four different emotions, which was the point in my discovery theme. I then clicked onto two different layers, went onto the advanced blending and unclicked the red channel, this made the image all together look 3D. Also to make it look more 3D I repositioned some of the photographs which also helped the overall image, as you can see the emotions more than if they were all on top of each other in the same position.

As you can see from the photographs below, they are rubbish quality and the emotions on the models face are really poor. At the start of this photo-shoot, I had planned that these would be my final images that I would use however when I was looking through them, I realised my first set of photographs were much better and showed more emotions than some of these. I think the problem with these ones was my model was tired and not in the right mind set, also it did not help that my parents were in the room at the time which was off putting for my model. I think if I wanted these photographs to turn out better I needed a quiet room with no interruptions or distractions. I would also need my model 100% focused on the task.