Project #10 - portrait photography

Fine art portraits:

These are two photos i took for this project, at first i never really planned for either of them to end up as the fine art portion of this project, but in the end i feel like i did a good job of showing how the fine art portraits can have a lot more freedom of expression, they allowed me to play around a lot more than in commercial portraits and sort of do whatever i want. the photos started out really bland and boring, i only really focused on the subject and failed to incorporate the background into a part of the picture as well. in the end i wanted the photo to less emphasize the person and more so challenge what a portrait is by having them be the main subject, but do most of my work on altering the environment around them. 

in the first photo i used the mixer brush in Photoshop to make it look as if everything man made that was on the subject was painted, showing that these objects are pieces of art as well even if we take them for granted.

In the second picture i wanted to show how everyone has an impact on the world, so in order to do this, i echoed the silhouette of my subject to show that even if you might feel minuscule in the grand scheme of things, everyone has an impact on everyone else and everything else, from the people you interact with to the ground you step on, we all leave our mark on the world.

Commercial portraits:

For this portion of the project we were supposed to shoot commercial portraits, and we weren't given any products to base it off of which to me made it just seem like the same as the fine art portrait, because without anything to go off of we weren't able to use it to influence our piece, so i more so tried to make it more similar to a magazine ad or cover, by allowing room to add text, and using almost mono tonal colours to allow high contrast.

for the first photo i cropped out my subject, then placed them on a plain background, where i then added a texture overlay onto the background. I found that the lighting seemed off so i then used the brush tool to add manual shading to the opposite side of the subject, making it appear as though the light was coming from the opposite side. finally i used the polygon tool to add some shapes to fill in the blank space

For the second picture, i first cropped my photo to just the face, then I added a B/W filter to just that layer, and on top of that i used the polygon tool again to add back in colour. For this picture i had a lot of trouble with lighting, as the light i took it in was extremely dim, and even if i tried to use the same thing i did in the last picture, the output was simply too grainy to look good, so since i didn't have time to take another photo, i simply worked with what i had, and gave it a darker theme.