evaluation

the more we see a person the more we recognise what defines them and how they portray that, it becomes a focal point to their being while all else fades into a single being: grandmother, mother, me, a word to a face that changes between all. the theme I hope to portray within this work is family and what they are to us, what defines them as an individual.

to represent this I have used inspiration from various artists, especially that of Rashed Haq

process

photography

to create a series of blurred and focused images I set camera to AV mode using both the higher and lower values to create a series of blurred and focused images that I later used photoshop to merge together this allows some of the facial features to be more visible than the others to give the appearance of defining traits such as the mouth and eyes, when taking the photos I had the subjects stand against a light coloured wall and illuminated them with a lamp in a dark room, this allowed a lot of contrast between light and dark areas to make the image more clear as well as to highlight the facial features so that they stand out even when  overlaid with similar images.  the greatest challenge of photography was to ensure that neither the light nor dark took over the image in addition to the background not merging in with the images, to overcome these I had to time the photos at night time since the areas would be overpowered with natural light if taken at any other time, and I used white walls to take the photos against.

photoshop

this method of editing is used to simulate the style of Rashed Haq who uses a 20 minute exposure time to create a single blurred image of a portrait.  in previous works I discover that using too many images to overlay one another can cause all the images to blur without leaving any defining traits, in addition to merging the image into the background, as a result of this it became apparent that fewer images would have to be used to make the final composition, in addition to increasing the contrast and making the image lighter to compensate for my home photoshop making an image lighter on screen than in print or on other devices. with this in mind I constructed five outcomes to reflect my theme, to create these I used not more than three images a piece with varying levels of opacity, the areas to convert to greyscale were then selected and changed using the hue and saturation tool, the colour areas were then selected and adjusted to make them brighter using the same tool, then different tools such as the colour replacement and eraser (soft, low opacity) were used to neaten up edges. the most challenging aspect within photoshop would be ensuring that the colours are brighter but do not take over the final image.

surrounding and organisation

to make the outcome more personal than coloured pictures on a wall I have organised them in order of relation in a style that replicates a family photo and surrounded them with the objects or those of similar colour to the image, to show that these belong with the individual. I have also used threat from inspiration from Jean Francois LePage and the marks he makes on images, this represents family ties in a very literal sense.