Connecting Essay 2

 

This image is by Chuck Close and it is a type of portraiture called a daguerreotype, this means that it was printed onto a sheet of silvered copper, it was a photographic technique used mainly in 1839-1860. So it is a very old technique that isn't used very often now a days. 

The image has quite high contrast, the background is completely black, whilst the models face is a very bright grey/white colour. In my opinion, I think that this looks good because we are able to see all of the face without being distracted by anything else in the image.

The depth of field used in this image is incredibly small, the prominent facial features are in focus but the neck and some of the hair isn't which is quite unusual. This means the viewer is focused only on the models face, rather than the clothes she is wearing or her jewellery. I love how this looks but personally I think it would be interesting to see everything in the image clearly.

My image has very high contrast, the lighting is very harsh on her left side whilst being very dark on her right side, in fact the light is reflecting off of the subjects face. In the studio the lighting wasn't as contrasted as this, I went onto photoshop to create an effect like this and I used curves to darken the dark parts and lighten up the light parts.

In this photograph I used a flash on one side so that side was lit up a lot and the other side wasn't as much.

I used a much larger depth of field because I think that it looks good to have a larger depth of field, it means that you can look at any of the subject and find something interesting, especially the hair.  Furthermore, it would be difficult to take a photograph like the one that Chuck Close took because my camera doesn't do a depth of field that small.

I chose to do this image in black and white because I think it made the face stand out more, when it was in colour, the subjects hair was quite distracting due to its colour and volume as she is ginger. However in black and white, the hair is still visible and you can see the lighter parts of the hair, although the facial features are definitely more eye-catching.

These two photographs are similar because they are both very similar portraits, both of them were taken in deadpan. In addition, they are both very close up images of the subject, where only their face and neck is visible. 

They are different due to the depth of field, Chuck Close's image has a very small depth of field and it focuses solely on the subjects face, whilst my camera focused on the entire image.