WEEKEND...

During the weekend I spent some time continuing to update my collection of portraits from 'The Guardian' - which still is still very interesting and surprising in terms of me realising how much more I am of other people facial expressions now than maybe I was before I started this project.

I also decided to take some photographs Sunday night which related to the work of Gary Schneider who I have been studying. Schneider's images seem to have been created using a very dark room, a long exposure on the camera and a torch to light up the face so this is exactly how I set my images up. I decided to get the sitter to lie on the floor as then they would move less so as not too blur the image too much. I also used a tripod as I would not be able to hold the camera steady with such a long exposure. The photo shoot was an experiment to find out if the effect was achievable and to see how this affected the photographs. The whole point of using the torch was so that I could highlight the areas that I felt were important in terms of identifying a certain facial expressions, for example a happiness face would be predominantly evident through the raising of the corner of the lips or "crow's feet" created at the corner of each eye. This was my main focus so I decided not to worry too much about the emotion expressed but just to experiment with the lighting and how I would be able to show only parts of the face rather than highlighting all of the face.

On reflection, I feel that the technique I used was reasonably easy to pick up and with a bit of practice could defiantly work in terms of only highlighting a small part of the face. However I sort of feel that because the lighting is so dark and eerie would this hinder or alter the way emotion is expressed, for example would a face expressing happiness be as obvious in the lighting used? This is something that I feel I will only be able to find out if I continue to experiment with the idea, particularly in terms of photographing each emotion...