Location Portraiture - Work Diary

For this session I was tasked with conducting a location portraiture shoot. My focus for this task was to take pictures of people in town rather than people from class as I felt this would be more unique and different from what I usually do. I was successful in doing this, although it was quite difficult to find people who were willing to have their picture taken. Also, we were tasked with including a narrow depth of field in our images and this was something that I struggled with as, most of the time, the subject of the image was against a background that I could not create a distinct separation with (for example, the second image below). In the first image below, I have an example of where I edited the image so that it included a narrow depth of field.

This was my favourite image of the shoot. What I enjoy about this image is how I managed to capture the man in his workplace - you can see the tray behind him with needles and dishes and he is wearing gloves. Alongside this, we see a bed and a tattoo-style poster. From this, it is clear that this was taken in a piercing studio. The original image had a wide depth of field, which is not what I wanted. To create a shallow depth of field, I used the lasso tool to select the man, inverted the selection and then used the gaussian blur tool make the background slightly out of focus. I feel that I was successful in creating a shallow depth of field this way.

Whilst I like this image, I do not feel that it followed the task of location portraiture. As the man was cleaning the windows, he was unable to face me and so I was unsuccessful in getting a picture of him from the front. If I had taken the picture from the side, I would have been able to get a picture of his face. I do not feel as though this image is an example of portraiture and so I do not like it as part of this task.

Progression

If I were to focus on this topic again, I would try to ensure that I focus more on getting a shallow depth of field in my images by playing more with my camera settings and trying to take the image against a background that has a distinct contrast against the subject. I will also ensure that the people that I take images of are able to face me and are not distracted as this was a problem with a couple of people that I took pictures of and so I was limited with what images I could use for my straight images.

Can I use this in my project?

I will be able to use this technique in my project as I am doing documentary photography and will be focussing on people within my image, which will result in location portraiture being a large part of my project.