Connecting Essay 3

This image is by Alec Soth of a young woman who is a swimmer. The image is quite formal, although it looks like he has just caught her, it is evident that the photo probably took some time to set up with the tripod and the settings on the camera, furthermore, the model is in a position that looks very posed, she is standing up straight looks away to the left, if this were a more casual image, she probably wouldn't look like that. 

The image is in the portrait orientation because it fits more of the model into the image, the background wasn't important to the image as we can see by it being out of focus, this means that Soth wanted to focus on the model rather than the location of the image so he used a small depth of field. In addition to the small depth of field, the model is only wearing a blue swimming hat in the image, this means that there is nothing in the image to really distract you away from her face, she isn't wearing any interesting jewellery so the model looks quite plain. Her face has makeup on it which is quite interesting as not many people wear makeup whilst they are swimming. 

This is my image which shows a teenage girl in London, I chose to take this image because I wanted to look at different people in different locations and I liked Brick Lane. My image looks quite formal because of the way I posed the subject, I decided that I wanted to use deadpan for my photograph because I think that it is easier to focus on different parts of the photo when the subject isn't showing any emotion. I let her wear whatever she wanted as I didn't want the photograph to be entirely staged so her normal clothes worked well for this image.

I chose to do it landscape orientation because I wanted to focus on the background as well as the model, this is evident by the fact that I chose to use a wide depth of field. I really like this image because the whole thing is in focus, some of my other images are slightly out of focus because I used manual focus and it just wan't perfect. 

My image is less staged than Alec Soth's because I didn't tell the model how to stand, I just told her to look into the lens with a straight face, whereas in his image, the model is standing very straight when she might not've been doing naturally. I think that the two are quite similar images but that there are very large differences, I decided that the background was important to the image so I focused on the background as well as the model, whilst he just focused on the girl as the background wasn't important to the image

In addition, my photograph has a lot more things to get distracted by, the model is wearing a bright red scarf on her body and her hair is down around her face, whereas in Soth's image, the model isn't wearing any clothes and her hair is in a hat so it isn't surrounding her face.