Digital Assignment: Portrait

Description: In this assignment, you will explore the process of digital image capture of portraits.  You will learn and implement appropriate camera settings.  Treat the assignment prompts as inspiration to experiment with concept, while learning the technical aspects of image capture of portraits.

Learning Objectives:

Capture human subjects

·         Experiment and learn camera controls

·         Apply camera control settings to achieve specific results, including appropriate exposure, dof, motion blur

·         Experiment with different lighting conditions

·         Make prints from digital images

Final Prints:   Pick any four images from your contact sheet that you feel are the most effective and most interesting.  Digitally process these images and make final images.  You need to print these images and we will mount one image.  Make sure you are renaming the files and saving them under your student ID drive. 

Your photographs must include experimentation with the following:

Camera Control Settings: Shutter speed (1/8 or slower or 1/125 or faster) , zoom, large depth of field (small aperture f/11 or smaller), small depth of field (large aperture f/5.6or bigger)

Lighting: Daylight, indoor light, backlit subject, high contrast, diffuse lighting, flash lighting, light angle using one light source

Choose 4 of the following concepts for your photographs:

Background/Place/location: Capture a human subject in a place, against a backdrop, or in a location that relates to their identity.  The environment in which someone lives, exists momentarily, does not belong.  Is the person out of place? Does the space represent something about the person?

Self-Portrait: Make a photograph that tells something about you.  Body language, facial expression, multiple identities, masks, etc.

Stranger: Candid or staged photograph of a stranger

Light/shadow: Create a “portrait” considering light/shadow.  Silhouettes, shadows-how does it effect picture?

Film Still: Recreate a movie still that has a person in it.  Consider reenacting a black and white movie still.

Painting: Find a painting with a human subject or painted portrait and recreate it.

Group: Make a photograph of a group of people.  Does it capture the ways in which people live, work, or play in groups? Extended family, little league team, friends, opposites, etc

Intimate Person: Make a picture of someone you know very well.  Try to capture their “likeness”.  How will you reveal who they are?

Gender: Make a photo that reveals something about a subject’s gender.  Think about advertising, modeling, stereotypes.  Reinforce or challenge these roles?

Adornment: Costume, clothing, everyday apparel.  Set up a scene with a backdrop, make up, prop.  How is it constructed? What is your lighting? Movement? Costuming can remove the subject from their “real identity”  and be use to elevate them from their existence or mask their identity.  Capture a portrait in which you play close attention to how their apparel conveys something about them. 

Final item checklist

4 concepts and camera control/lighting experimentation for a total of about 120 photos

Photo shoots are due in two parts (2 concepts per deadline)

1^st set : end of Friday 17^th

2^nd set: end of Wednesday 22^nd

Digitally edited and on blog:  end of class Friday 24^th

Print/mount:  Monday 1/27

Four final digitally processed images printed

1 mounted photograph