People 'The Human Condition' Brief Evaluation

Unit 5 Evaluation – People

Photographing people can initially seem at first pretty easy however I’d say it is definitely not the easiest of genres especially if as a photographer you are not a great people person. Luckily for me I like to think that I can make people feel comfortable in front of my camera whether they are known to me or not and during this brief I feel that the images I have obtained shows that this is a true statement.

Fine Art & Corporate Portrait

Sub genres of portraiture at first seem pretty straight forward however after discussing in more depth with my tutor I realised that what I thought may well be a certain type of portrait, mainly fine art portraiture, possibly will not be due to the image not being evident as part of a theme to back up your reasoning for taking the photograph.

My idea for my fine art shoot was to photograph my friend Natalie who works as a fire woman and is also a full time mum, I wanted to convey a message through an artistic portrait that she is two people in one, a full time public service respected fire woman and also a full time caring mother.

This type of theme would have been more enlightening if I had also photographed other working mothers accompanied with their children to represent mothers going back to work after not long having their children. Also with the brief aiming us to approach different people to photograph I had obviously not taken this into consideration at that time therefore realised that I was unable also to use the same person within all of my shots for my final 8 images.

Below are the images I felt I would have considered to use if I had undergone this sub genre in the correct manner from the start.

Likewise, with my corporate photographs they are all again of my friend Natalie which therefore does not show that I have been able to approach any other people, people that are not known to me. If however any of the corporate photographs of Natalie could have been selected if I was to have taken other peoples corporate photographs to use as a theme series then these are the photographs I would have considered to have been selected for my final 8 images.

Candid and Environmental Portraits

Candid photography I can safely say is a definite sub genre of portraiture that I didn’t feel comfortable with. I did experiment with a little street photography, I say street however I was just randomly photographing people whilst walking around a theme park. I didn’t feel that these pictures were adequate enough to even add on my blogger therefore I decided to take a more relaxed approach to experimenting with candid photography at my dad’s work. I felt more comfortable as the workers were aware that I was in the print works, however may not have always been aware that I was taking a picture of them at a certain time.

After researching and experimenting into the four study areas of sub genre portraiture I feel that my attempts at capturing environmental portraits are my most successful group of photographs. My idea was to capture people within their working environment utilising what available light was already there, I believe if I had have used artificial lighting this would not have been a true reflection as to the environment that the workers would usually work in, therefore I did not dramatize the situation which evidently if I did would not have been a correct interpretation of the visual message which I wanted to convey.

Below are my chosen final 8 images selected as a group of working environmental portraits