Evaluation

My overall topic for this unit was 'Close Ups'. I brain stormed a bit on what I could do for this topic and I decided that going down the route of close ups of the human body would be the best thing to do. I figured that it would be an interesting topic to do as you can see all of the detail that you didn't know was there on a human body. Close up photos of the human body also show the unflattering side of things because you are seeing the parts of the body that you see from far away usually, up close. For this whole project I used the Canon 550D with a 75mm Sigma lens. This meant that I could get right up close and the quality was great.

I started off my project with a powder paint photo shoot. I splattered powder paint all over my models face and I took photos of her with lights on her in a pitched black room. This made the colours and her features stand out a lot more. This was a really successful shoot with the best photo being the close up of the eye. It would have been interesting to experiment and use different kinds of coloured things such as normal liquid paint, to see what the difference would have been and whether it would have looked better or worse.

I moved on from the powder paint and I looked at the parts of the human body such as the skin the eyes and the hands. I wanted to make these photos look natural unlike the powder paint ones. To do this, I took the photos in my conservatory where there was natural lighting from outside. This made the photos for detailed as you could see the creases and the hair on the skin and the dirt under the nails. I think the skin shoot went quite well as you got to see how different everyone skin actually is. Some have really fine hair with no freckles and some have really thick hair with lots of freckles. This just shows that we are all unique in our own way. The hand shoot also went very well with the best photo being the one of the woman's hand. You can really see the dirty nails and the pattern of the skin which really fascinates me. The eye photos were also a good shoot because you could see the details in and around the eye.

From this I moved onto imperfections on the human body. I could only really do one shoot for this and so couldn't really carry that aspect on any more this is because I only know one person that has an imperfection on their skin. Despite not being able to carry on this topic, the photo shoot did go quite well. You can see the pigmentation on her back really clearly and after editing it a bit more to make it stand out you could see it a lot more clearly.

From this I went on to experiment with more parts of the body such as feet, hair, mouths and more faces. These photo shoots weren't the best that I have done and I don't think they went too well compared to the ones before. However, I did get two really good shoots from the topic of hands again. I wanted to experiment with hands as the photos before went so well. To do this I added a cigarette into the picture. I wanted the photos to look as interesting as possible so I got a man's hands for this shoot as I didn't think a woman's' hands would be as effective. I got my model to hold the cigarette in many positions so that I had a lot to choose from. I put them on the computer and I edited them to make them black and white. This made them look so much better and it made them have more meaning to them. This photo shoot was incredibly successful and made me want to experiment more with hands after I had just experimented with other parts of the body first.

At the end of my project I decided to come back to hands and take more pictures like the ones with the cigarette in the photo. I got the same model and I asked him to do random things with him hands. I saw a picture on the internet of a hand in a window and I decided to get him to put his hand on the window and when he took it off there was a hand print which looked quite sincere. I then got him to intertwine his hands together so that his hands looked deformed in some way which made an interesting photo. I edited these into black and white so that they matched the cigarette ones. These looked a million times better in black and white than in colour as you just focus on the hands and not all the colour around the hands.

After a lot of pondering, I decided to use the cigarette photos and the hands on the window photos as my final pieces. I thought they were very successful shoots and they were well developed. I also think they look really good together as six final photos. They have meaning to them and are good quality close up pictures.