Location Portraiture- Work Diary

During the lesson on Tuesday 6th September, we got set a task to take location portraiture- 5 photos in 5 different locations, in the style of Alec Soth image "From here to There" Of a man holding two planes on a rooftop with a forest in the background.  I am overall happy with how this shoot turned out because I believe I met the objective of taking similar photos to Alec Soth.

The equipment I used in today's lesson was a tripod. This was very important because it meant my main focus could be the manual focus on making my subject sharp. This technique takes both the portrait of a subject and the location into account, the main technique of this is to make the background out of focus and the subject sharp- getting a depth of field effect.

My favourite photo of this shoot:

Even though some people may see this image as being "too formal" and not a causal as Alec Soth's image, this is personally my favourite image because I really like how straight the lines are in this image-thanks to the tripod. I also like how I managed to position my subject in the middle of the building in the background. I personally think the focus on this image is really clear and my subject is sharp- the way it should be. The only down side is that the background isn't as out of focus as I had wanted, but I think in this case it was really well. The Shutter Speed I used was 1/125 and the f.stop was 14. The reason I had a fast shutter speed was because I wanted my subject to be as sharp as possible, this meant that I couldn't have a slower shutter speed as otherwise the subject/camera may move slightly, leading to a distorted subject rather than a sharp one. We started this shoot on quick a low f.stop because we were originally inside. However, when we went on top of a car park, it got really bright so we had to adjust the f.stop to fit better- otherwise the photo was too over exposed.

My least favourite photo from this shoot:

I took many photos in this way were turned out good, however I have chosen this one as my least favourite because my subject blinked and when mid speaking, therefore it isn't how I wanted it to turn out. As shown on my straight images, there is another one very similar of this image, with the subjects eyes open which is much better. Another reason this is one of my least favourite images is because of the slight tile of the camera- as the tripod was a little wobbly, it has tilted some of the images I took. Another reason my subject may have had his eyes closed may have been because the sun was really bright at this moment in time- this could have been resolved by moving my subject around, however then the background wouldn't have been the same. The camera settings I used for this image was the same as the one above for the same reasons of wanted a sharp image and the brightness causing a need for a higher f.stop to make sure it wasn't too over exposed.

Progression:

This is an image take by Alec Soth, it is very similar  to the image we got told to take photos in the inspiration of- this image is shown on my techniques post for location portraiture. If I were to reshoot this, I would try harder to make sure my background was out of focus ti make it resemble the work of Alec Soth better.