Friday advice...

During my time at college on Friday morning I spent the majority of time seeking advice about the directions I want my final project to take and what I feel I want the final outcome to be. I spoke to Nick the photograph tutor as I felt that he would be able to give the best advice as my project is very much based around photography as a chosen medium. Within the dicussion I gained some invaluable advice about the direction my project was going in:

Nick felt that just creating a series of close up portrait photographs of different facial expressions was a too simple concept on its on and need to be developed further in a different direction. Even if I did decide that I want to keep just the close up portraits shots a final outcome at least by looking at different areas of portrait photography it shows that I have thought about other possibilities in order to create the best outcome as possible. We spent a lot of time discussing how I could use photography to expose each emotion, particularly in terms of showing the viewer how that emotion is conveyed in the face - Nick then came up with a photographer he felt would relate to this idea of highlighting the areas of the face that are in important in each expressions:

A link to Gary Schiender's series of portrait photographs on his website:

Schiender's portraits are created in blacked out room with a camera set on a long exposure but most important he uses a torch to control the light so he can highlight the areas of the face he wants to show. Personally I feel this will work really well in relation to my project as I feel I will be able to control the way each emotion is shown and be able to highlight the areas that are important in each emotion. I will also be able to experiment with the idea of merging the emotions that have similar characteristics within one long exposure.

A few examples of Schiender's work: