Skip to main content

Portrait photography and David Hockney

I wanted to look at Portrait photography, and capture the people around me and how i see them. I thought about this for a while how can i capture how i see them ? .

I was thinking about pictures in general of people, when you see a profile picture of someone  on social media and think, that doesn't look like them. but it is them, so how can it not look like them in comparison to how you see them ? It is a still image of them from one angle from one view point. Is how i see someone, in real life? no!

This made me think about Cubism and the idea of an object, having mutable view points, is this the same for people? how can it not be?

What makes a person to me, is how i see them in motion or from all the different points of view i see them from. This made me think about how i can capture this in a portrait, a lot of different view points and overlay overlay them over each other. I tried to consider the angles in which i usually see them to make it more personal to my world and my view, for example if the person is taller than me, or if we are usually sitting down the view point is different. i decided to start researching this idea and found an artists called David Hockney.

David Hockney is an English painter, printmaker and photographer. Hockney is well known for his photo collages and when i saw these it was like a light bulb went off in my head, this is exactly how i want to express my idea of mutable view points. In my last units, i loved collage. So why cant i do this with this project? I CAN! i can print them out or do them on photoshop.

 Telephone Pole, 1982

I love this collage, the composition of it and the idea behind it i decided to see if he had done any portraits and found a few, for example this one of his mother.



Brilliant!

I decided to start experimenting with a self portrait. I took photos of myself from all different angles and started editing them. putting layers on top of each other.



I really liked the softness in this, but i wanted to keep going i started again trying to rotate some of the images around.

I liked the rotation of the images but i was unsure about the amount of images i used i decided to try overlaying the top image over this one.


I really like this image, i think it works well and i enjoyed creating it a lot. This made me think about printing the images out and making a collage on paper or mounting board!

I will take photos in the studio at college and make a collage next week. i think this is a good start and i feel like i am onto something with this i just want to keep it going!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art & Design Portfolio - Sam Cornwell (Digital)

I decided to start my research on paper based and digital portfolios by first looking at a digital portfolio. One artist who came into the college to do a talk was a photographer called Sam Cornwell, he took us through his digital portfolio. I wanted to think about why his portfolio was digital and not paper based. One of the biggest advantages of a digital portfolio is the accessibility of it. It is easy to send out to employers or people wishing to view it. It is digital so it can easily be send to someone via email or put on a USB and accessed that way. Another reason is unlike a paper based portfolio there is more than one, it is easy to dispatch without spending money on paper to print. It is also instant, you might have to wait a few days for a paper port folio to be sent by mail or spend money on travel to bring it to the person wishing to view it. With a digital portfolio one click and it is sent! I went onto Sam Cornwell's page and found out his portfolio is on his web...
Post a Comment
Read more

Starting experimenting with photography

After looking into the work of Henry Weston i decided to try and experiment,first, with negative space. It was something that stood out to me a lot in some of his work, as i spoke about in my report. i started by just taking a few pictures as i noticed it around me. I think these are a very interesting start and have a lot of potential, i decided to play around with the editing a bit by cropping them, changing the contrast and making them black and white.  i like this image and i think composition wise it works. i also think it looks good in black and white as it has gotten rid of the chance of clashing colours and sets a different kind of mood. The subject is in focus and it looks quite sharp. I cropped it a little and changed the contrast and exposure.  i prefer this image to the top one as i like the spacing between the feet compared to the first one i think it is more visually pleasing, i also rotated this image just as an experiment. ...
3 comments
Read more

Art wolfe - My world, my view.

Another photographer i decided to look at is called Art Wolfe. Wolfe's work is a combination of Art and journalism, he graduated from the University of Washington with Bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and art education in 1975, since then he has worked on every continent, in hundreds of locations, and on a range of different projects. I started by looking into Wolfe's technique, i found a lot of information on the type of camera he uses (Canon’s 5DS R) and the lenses he uses - "Mostly “L” series lenses, Canon’s professional designation, the 16-35 f/2.8 L II and the 70-200 f/4 L IS. He uses extension tubes for macro work with the 70-200 and adds 1.4x extenders. But i wanted to look into his editing techniques not his equipment, although interesting and worth putting on here for future reference.   I found out Wolfe uses "Photo manipulation" in some of his photographs. Although his photographs are not heavily edited, he uses techniques like cloning the animal...
Post a Comment
Read more