For this week’s assignment, I decided to take portraits of my friend’s son, Kane – which was entertaining yet difficult at the same time…
For my first photo, I chose to take a picture of Kane and attempted to capture an example of hard light. There is an obvious source of light being cast on the left side of his face. There is lighting coming from an above ceiling fan, but the more dramatic lighting, is hitting his face on the left from a window across the room. The white wall and black couch in the background also helps to make his figure stand out, especially his blondish-red hair. I also tried out some editing techniques by removing some of the blemishes from his face.
For my example of Soft Light, I used a picture of Kane that I had taken outside, underneath the playground. There is an obvious shadow casted across his face and also his body caused by the playground equipment. It was a sunny and hot outside, causing the picture to have dark shadows in the foreground and bright, sunny spots in the background. The sun does actually make a brief appearance on the left side of his face, as it peeps through the fixture.
Attempting to take pictures showing lighting of the golden hour was one of my favorites of the different lightings. It created the most dramatic and beautiful pictures caused by the clouds and the amount of sunlight, blocked with the subject in the foreground. For this representation, I took a photo of my boyfriend at Lennox, with the sunlight peeking out around his head, even through the thinner parts of his hair. The photo was taken a few minutes before the sun finished setting. To exaggerate some of the effects on this photo, I cranked up the saturation to +40 and turned the hue down to -36, which created a neat look to the photo.
For my free edit, I chose to do another example of hard lighting. This photo shows bright, sunlight coming from behind Kane and hitting the top of his head. Also, you can see how the light sort of wraps around his arms, beginning at the top. Along with the light shown on Kane’s body, there are strong shadows around the picture caused by Kane and the playground equipment proving that there is a heavy amount of light coming from above.
In these photos, you can get a sense of a personality or an identity from Kane. In two of the photos, he has an enormous smile – as most children this age usually do – accompanied by his favorite toys. In my first example of hard lighting, he shows somewhat of a smile, but a little bit of his attitude too.