set 3
In my third set I’m planning to use the ideas shown by Travis Commeau in his work. His work included doing things like not focusing the image of a person to show how he himself is short sighted, I could do this in my work to show someone who has bad eye sight or doesn’t really want their photo taken. I could do this by not focusing the camera fully, blur it in post-process or experiment with the lens or the lighting to blur it. Furthermore, I’m going to try doing something with long exposure. My plan for this is to go out in London during the night and taking photos of the traffic, iconic buildings and busy lit high streets. I got this idea after looking at one of Travis Commeau’s photos and looking at many similar long exposure photos. In this set I hope to get a series of photos that I can base other sets around and use some elements of it in my final piece.
In this set I used inspiration from Travis Commeau’s set Myopic where he blurred the photos to show his problems with his eyesight. I blurred the photos I took of people to make them feel more comfortable with having their photo taken; this worked as when the photo is blurred it gives a feeling of anonymity so people feel free to act as themselves without worrying about if someone is judging them or not. So as I started taking portraits I switched the camera to manual and blurred it manually, I varied the blur depending on how shy people were or if they felt uncomfortable and told them to do whatever came to their head. This resulted in people being silly and pulling faces with the confidence of the blur and other not really doing anything because of no wanting people to stare at them. The plan for this set was to take portrait photos with inspiration from Commeau’s work and personally I think this was very successful and I could develop it further for my final piece. However, the bad thing in this set is I didn’t touch on long exposure like I wanted to, meaning I’ll have to do that next set or put it on its own as a stand alone set. What I plan to do with this set now is let it mold my next set also mold some of my ideas for the final piece as I want to work with this and add the ideas I had for the other sets in with this and see the result.
This links to my topic ‘changed’ as it shows how quickly someone will change when they know that the anonymity of the camera blur isn’t there to hide away their real character. Also, it’s an altered way of seeing someone; we normally see people very clearly if nothings there to blur it so seeing it from another person’s perspective, who may have bad eye sight without glasses.
This links to my topic ‘changed’ as it shows how quickly someone will change when they know that the anonymity of the camera blur isn’t there to hide away their real character. Also, it’s an altered way of seeing someone; we normally see people very clearly if nothings there to blur it so seeing it from another person’s perspective, who may have bad eye sight without glasses.
This is one of my favorites out of the set because it’s a perfect example of what I want to achieve; on that line of being totally obscure and just recognizable. This is my favorite because not only is it very similar to Commeau’s Myopic work but also you can see my own spin of the idea, using the blur of the photo to give shy people more confidence to be themselves and just relax in front of the lens. I took this photo to show just how different people are when they know their peers or strangers aren’t judging them or laughing at how they act. Adding on to this, it catches the persons true character and as I stated before it’s because of that blur that allows people to do this without being self-conscious and worrying what society are going to think about them at first glance. For this set, I setup one studio light facing behind and to the side of the subject\person I was photographing and put a soft box on the other side to reflect the light so all the photo itself wasn’t under-exposure. Personally, I don’t think this photo needs to be put through post-processing because the color set and composition of the photo is exactly how I planned it to be. What I could have done better however, is used a completely blank background as the door handle reflects the light from the studio lighting drawing focus away from the subject that I want people to see; which is the person.
This photo shows the other side of Commeau’s work, that being the very sharp and well-lit set called Studio. I took this with the camera very focused and with the studio lights coming from the side but shining more onto the subject to cast a shadow on the other side of him, giving the photo a high contrast. I took this photo to show how different people act when they don’t have the anonymity of the blur to express themselves, this results in people in the sharp photos, like this, looking very nervous, uncomfortable and not really sure what to do. Whereas people in blurred photos seem very free, comfortable to be themselves and seem as if the camera isn’t there. This shows how society affects people differently; for people who can’t be pointed out and judge by others (blurred photo) they act how they would around friends not really caring who see them. However, when it comes to being shown to strangers or their peers (sharp photos) they suddenly stop being themselves and double think everything they normally do. This is what I hope to display in my final piece the sudden change in behavior depending on who sees you and how you display yourself and how self-conscious we really are when it comes to being looked at by society.